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ABSTRACT
How can music therapy contribute to the future design and development of interactive and musical media for co-creation, and vice versa? This question is addressed through a reflective synthesis on selected results of the research project called RHYME (www.rhyme.no), in which the author took part. That project involved families of a child with disabilities and their co-creation with interactive musical media that were designed as home-environment objects (e.g. pillows, carpets, and toys). This paper examines aspects of the project results with regard to the subject-object interaction. One such aspect is that the users would experience the media as active collaborators and not “just” as another technological thing which they could manipulate into a cause-and-effect reaction. Another such aspect is that successful co-creation with the media seemed to demand an open and empathic (also called dialogical) mind-set among those who took on the role of helper. The paper argues that music therapy competency in human communication and interaction is significant for future developers of interactive media. Music therapy should also note the close connection humans have to the media, and learn from the ways in which this relationship too can be potentially health promoting.
Acknowledgments
I appreciatively acknowledge the participating parents and children in the RHYME project, Haug School and Resource Centre and its staff, as well as the group MusicalFieldsForever, represented by Anders-Petter Andersson, Birgitta Cappelen and Fredrik Olofsson, for their original contributions. I am also grateful for the collaboration with the whole research in the RHYME project. The RHYME project has been funded by The Norwegian Research Council [201473].
Conflict of interests
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See http://skoogmusic.com and www.soundbeam.co.uk.
2 I refer to the children’s collaborators as “close others”. Sometimes I just refer to “the users”.
3 See photos of the CCTs in –. Photos courtesy Birgitta Cappelen. None of the persons in the photos are victims or clients in therapy. The adults have approved the use of the photos of the children on the photos.
4 See –. This article will not provide a thick description of the media in RHYME.
5 WAVE includes both WAVE carpet and WAVE Orange (see www.rhyme.no). Here, WAVE refers only to the carpet.
6 To learn more about the ways people used the media and the detailed results of the testing in RHYME, see Cappelen and Andersson (Citation2011a; Citation2011b, Citation2014), Eide (Citation2014) and Stensæth (Citation2014a).
7 Most of the results from RHYME are presented in the anthology Music, Health, Technology and Design (Stensæth, Citation2014a).
8 This way, the CCTs were able to draw upon an infinite number of potential responses to the user interactions. The responses, which could be musical (singing, for example), had (1) sound nodes, (2) algorithms and (3) narrative structures (Cappelen & Andersson, Citation2011a; Citation2011b, Citation2014).
9 The label stems from my internalisation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogue philosophy on responsiveness in music therapy improvisation (Stensæth, Citation2017).
10 No paging.
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Notes on contributors
Karette Stensæth
Dr. Karette Stensæth is Associate Professor in Music Therapy at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she also works as the Director of CREMAH (Centre of Research in Music and Health). She has edited several books in the publication series from the centre and completed her postdoc in the RHYME project in 2015, of which this study is a part. Stensæth completed her PhD research on music therapy improvisation in 2008 and has much clinical experience as a music therapist working with children and youth with special needs. She has elaborated upon philosophical perspectives in music therapy in her research. Her latest book is Responsiveness in Music Therapy Improvisation. A Perspective Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, which was published by Barcelona Publishers in 2017.