Favouring emotional processing in improvisational music therapy through resonance frequency breathing: a single-case experimental study with a healthy client

ABSTRACT

Resonance frequency breathing (RFB) is a form of slow breathing at around six breaths/min, whose immediate effects are to substantially increase heart rate variability (HRV) and to reduce stress levels. Since RFB has already been successfully used on its own to treat various emotional disorders, we wanted to evaluate its effect on emotional processing when used as a preparatory intervention in improvisational music therapy. To do so, we performed a single-subject experimental study with a healthy participant. We hypothesised that RFB would serve both as an emotional catalyst and emotional regulator, the actual outcome depending on the client’s current issues and needs. The study consisted of 10 music therapy sessions, with the breathing intervention used at the beginning of every other session, in alternation with a control intervention. The data collection focussed on HRV during talking and music-making, emotion and abstraction levels in verbal content, body language, and a set of music features extracted from the client’s improvisations. Our results show that the sessions starting with RFB were characterised by higher stress levels and the expression of more negative emotions, without it leading to hyperarousal and integration problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Improvisational music therapy
• resonance frequency breathing
• heart rate variability
• stress
• emotions

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Prof. Erhard Mergenthaler for kindly providing the text analysis software used in this study.

Notes

¹ For more information on the development of these dictionaries, see Mergenthaler (1996).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olivier Brabant

Olivier Brabant holds a Master’s degree in Music Therapy. He is currently conducting his doctoral studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests include non-ordinary states of consciousness and their therapeutic benefits, as well as the promotion of insight, creativity, and emotional regulation in music therapy through the use of methods derived from heart rate variability biofeedback. Email: [email protected]

Safa Solati

Safa Solati holds a Master’s degree in Music Therapy from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her Master’s thesis focused on music therapy and autism. She is currently enrolled in the “MusicTogether” teacher training, a Music and Movement programme aimed at children from new-borns to pre-schoolers in Bologna, Italy. Email: [email protected]

Nerdinga Letulė

Nerdinga Letulė is a member of the Lithuanian Music Therapy Association and has degrees in Musicology as well as in Music, Mind, and Technology. She is currently a doctoral candidate in music therapy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, researching methods of music analysis that can be meaningfully applied to clinical improvisations. Email: [email protected]

Ourania Liarmakopoulou

Ourania Liarmakopoulou has been a music teacher in secondary education of Greece since 2004. She is a musician with a Bachelor in Musicology (Faculty of Music Studies of Kapodistrian, University of Athens) and a Master in Music Therapy (University of Jyväskylä, Finland). Along with her studies in Western music (diploma in cello and flute), she has studied Ottoman classical music at the Department of Musicology of the Institute of Social Sciences of Istanbul Technical University, Turkey. Email: [email protected]

Jaakko Erkkilä

Jaakko Erkkilä, PhD, is Professor of Music Therapy at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He runs the international Master’s Programme in Music Therapy and is the Head of the Music Therapy Clinical Trainings at the Eino Roiha Institute, in Jyväskylä and in Tampere, Finland. His clinical experience includes working with people with psychiatric and developmental disorders, and children with neurological disorders. He has been involved in research networks funded by the Academy of Finland and the European Union (EU6 and EU7 frameworks, Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research). He serves on the editorial boards of several music therapy journals and is a member of the Consortium of Music Therapy Research. His current research interests are the theory and practice of improvisational music therapy. Email: [email protected]