These strict protocols are necessary to answer specific research questions, with little room for individualizing approaches to fit a clinical music therapy situation. Furthermore, subjects' movements may be restricted, or they cannot use particular materials or musical instruments while undergoing an imaging study, due to the nature and constraints of the imaging equipment. For example, the magnetic field generated by an fMRI machine would preclude investigating the subject's playing of any instruments that contain metal.
Despite these limitations, researchers interested in active music making have found ways to work around these limitations, by using materials safe for the scanner e. Each imaging method also has its strengths and limitations in its temporal and spatial resolution; thus researchers should choose the most appropriate imaging method for the research question, given the kind of data the imaging can obtain.
Research in recent years has demonstrated ways that music therapy and neuroimaging can work well together, particularly for rehabilitation from neurologic injury.
These highlights are in addition to more comprehensive reviews of music therapy in rehabilitation Hurt-Thaut, ; Leins et al. More recently, researchers have used neuroimaging to discover lasting changes in brain functioning after 18 sessions of music therapy for depression Fachner et al. While these studies are encouraging, readers must note that CNS methods have limitations, many of which have been summarized in Christensen Many studies utilize synthesized music or tones, or short segments of music. It is rare for studies to use complete pieces of music.
Furthermore, imaging equipment restricts or does not work well with body movement, limiting naturalistic ways that subjects may move while listening to or playing music. Also, because equipment is expensive and specialized, it is often located in a medical setting or laboratory, a context far removed from where clients would usually encounter music therapy. In addition, many CNS studies do not adequately report the sources of the music selections used in the research, making it difficult to interpret findings.
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Aside from these methodological restrictions, the epistemological assumptions of CNS research are also restricted. Researchers assume there are universal responses to the music conditions, and dismiss outlier responses as statistical noise. There is no room for investigating unique brain responses to the experimental conditions. When researchers ignore these meanings in their designs and simply create segments of tonal or rhythm patterns as their stimuli, they are really examining the brain's responses to tonal and rhythm patterns—not music. The socially-constructed nature of music is directly related to the field of music therapy, because music therapy involves a relationship between client and therapist Bruscia, This relationship involves the intersubjective nature of music, along with nonverbal communication and social and environmental context.
These are all significant factors in the music therapy experience which must be included in order to assure ecological and sociological validity.
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Translating CNS research to the practice of music therapy therefore requires that the client-therapist relationship be taken into account in the research question, design, and interpretation of results. For CNS to incorporate the interpersonal, subjective, and contextual factors inherent in music therapy, researchers must first be very clear about their epistemological stances in their research, while also considering other perspectives.
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Each perspective has strengths and limitations, and requires appropriate expertise in a research context. This model, called the Four Quadrants, has been applied to music therapy as well Bruscia, to help delineate different clinical phenomena and approaches. This is also where traditional CNS research is located—music and related behaviors are viewed as objects, and brain responses to it are objectively measured and analyzed. Music therapy approaches located in this quadrant include behavioral interventions and any intervention that focuses on observable, measurable outcomes.
Research located in this quadrant includes phenomenology and heuristic research, while the music therapy methods here include psychoanalytic or humanistic approaches that emphasize the individual's internal experience which typically cannot be measured or observed objectively.
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The future of music therapy research needs to address several kinds of phenomena. First, it needs to account for the variability among subjects' neurological responses. For example, research should consider cultural and personal context in neurological development, which can lead to unique patterns of perception and response Schore, In particular, research should attempt to address client-therapist interaction during clinical experiences.
In other words, the future of music therapy research in the neurosciences should involve perspectives from quadrants other than the Upper Right.
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Some research methods from these quadrants have already been developed in the neurosciences. One such method is neurophenomenology Varela, This approach originated as a biological investigation of subjectivity and consciousness, but evolved to include other phenomena including an integrated investigation into the biological and subjective experience of a guided imagery and music session Hunt, The approach integrates objective data and subjective experience in individuals, holding that 1 the first-person experience is irreducible, 2 the first-person investigation must be rigorous, and 3 the first- and third-person perspectives are equally important.
In the Hunt study, the researcher collected phenomenological data from each participant's imagery report of the music therapy session, and correlated it with EEG coherence data to generate integrated descriptions of biological and subjective experience during the sessions. Hyperscanning is another research method with great potential for music therapy.
Here, imaging data are collected simultaneously from two or more subjects and analyses focus on ways that the brain data synchronize with each other around shared experiences or events. More recent studies have utilized hyperscanning with functional near-infrared spectroscopy fNIRS; see review in Scholkmann et al. Integrating multiple participants' data could even be used within a neurophenomenological approach in order to understand what participants undergo while making music together in music therapy.
In addition to these new methodological and paradigmatic approaches, portable EEG Wascher et al. Research designs and questions which focus on these portable devices' imaging strengths could lead to greatly increased understanding of neurological activity during music therapy experiences. With the advent of both innovative neuroimaging technology and new research perspectives and designs, music therapists are uniquely poised to undertake ground-breaking research into ways that music therapy affects and benefits clients.
However, prevailing thinking around CNS research could divert attention away from these possibilities, and instead focus research on Upper Right phenomena alone. While this research undoubtedly has been beneficial, it has limited translatability to music therapy experience and practice. Let us not limit our understanding to one perspective; instead let us step into new perspectives, as we do with our clients, willingly looking at the world from a new place, with new eyes, and new comprehension.
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Front Hum Neurosci v. Published online Jun 9. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Instead of being used at this point, it is often fed into a corporate information system which, having recycled it, issues the result in a form that does not always meet needs. In Measuring Performance, David Jenkins examines the more traditional measures of performance and highlights their shortcomings as well as assessing the merits of the alternative approaches that are currently available.
The book concludes with a step-by-step guide to reviewing the effectiveness of your organisation's existing systems for measuring performance and identifying ways of improving them. After an initial spell in public relations he moved into industry, working as a manager in project, manufacturing and marketing roles in aerospace and polymer processing. He then spent several years as head of management studies at South West London college.
In , having worked as an advisor to a multinational manufacturer of elevators and a Swedish car maker, he set up TEK Associates, a small consultancy to assist organizations in finding better ways of improving and measuring their performance. Measuring Performance is his fourth book.
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