Music Therapy
Cutting Edge Pediatric and Adult Therapy believes in the comprehensive treatment of the whole person. With developmental and learning differences, this often involves many collaborative units working together to support our clients’ personal growth to their fullest potential. One of those essential collaborative units is music therapy.
What is Music Therapy?
Music Therapy is the evidence-based, clinical practice of using music to reach non-musical goals. As music is inherently human and an age-appropriate, multisensory, enjoyable activity, its ability to wordlessly reach each individual where they are in a non-intimidating manner makes it widely appealing and effective. Neurology research has shown that using music in tandem with language stimulates the brain unilaterally and promotes emotional regulation, spontaneous language, increased neural plasticity, and more. Music therapy consists of sequenced activities utilizing receptive, recreative, compositional, and improvisational methods to reach predetermined goals.
Music therapy therapeutic methods include:
- Structured and unstructured movement
- Instrument play
- Singing and/or vocalizing
- Improvisation
- Receptive music listening
- Songwriting
To address each goal, music is intentionally used by the clinician to serve as motivation, method, reward, structure, or background. During the evaluation, the music therapist determines what part of music serves the client’s learning best, and identifies your child’s strengths and areas of need, in order to develop a music therapy treatment plan that will best support their development through music.
What Goals Does Music Therapy Address?
Our music therapist provides evaluation and treatment on the following goal areas:
- Attention deficit disorders
- Communication delays
- Pragmatic language
- Cognitive tasks (e.g. sequencing, problem solving, etc.)
- Auditory processing and discrimination
- Social skills (turn-taking, joint attention, active listening, etc.)
- Gross and fine motor skills
- Gait training
- Functional routines (Activities of Daily Living)
- Sensory integration
- Emotional identification
- Emotional regulation
- Coping skills
- Resistance to non-preferred activities
- Self-expression
- Confidence
- Skill acquisition
Why Cutting Edge for Music Therapy?
Cutting Edge’s holistic approach to therapy allows for a multidisciplinary approach. As music therapy focuses more on the method than the scope, having access to collaboration and co-treatment with other clinicians allows music therapy to best approach each domain. As frequently as is helpful for each client, collaboration and co-treatment will be offered to support a unified approach to goals. The Speech Therapy team’s focus on Gestalt Language Processors (GLPs) is combined with the intrinsically supportive sung communication of Music Therapy, meaning that a child’s language learning style will also be addressed in music therapy.
The facility itself is uniquely well-resourced, with plenty of free play space, an apartment to practice activities of daily living (ADLs), as well as a designated music therapy space, fully equipped with a multitude of engaging and high-quality instruments.
Our music therapist utilizes an integrated approach, borrowed from combined therapeutic approaches to meet each client where they are: resource oriented, humanistic, behavioral, and child led. Among other things, this approach upholds each client’s communication as valid, no matter the method, and that each client has the capability, right, and resources from their own experience to become all that they can be (self-actualization). This compassionate approach provides the flexible support necessary for each need to be met and each strength to be celebrated.