The Dance of Wellbeing: Defining the Musical Therapeutic Effect

Abstract

Music making is a human activity that communicates motives – the underlying impulses for action, by which experience is gained, and which are accompanied by feelings. Music evokes narratives of experience, based on our innate ability to share the passing of expressive ‘mind time’, an ability that may be called ‘musicality’. which is inseparable from the impulse to move with anticipation of rhythmic sensory consequences and varied emotional evaluations. Communicative musicality is the source of the music therapeutic experience and its effects. An inborn musicality is clearly uncovered in acoustic analyses of parent/infant vocal interactions, where, independent of verbal communication, a shared sense of time and the shaping of jointly-created pitch contours describe phrases and narrative cycles of feeling. There is new evidence that the communication of motives and experience is supported by systems of ‘sympathy neurones’ in the regulatory core of the brain, and by the ‘vitality affects’ they generate. The music therapy relationship seeks a dance of human passion and well-being by fundamentally intuitive means. Its verbal/cognitive regulation is necessary for the cultivation and recording of its technique, but not the origin of its immediate power ¹.

Keywords: musicality - therapy - infants - movement - emotion - timing - communication