Phil Daley wrote:
At 8/2/2005 10:07 AM, Andrew Stiller wrote:
My wife is a nurse practitioner at the local VA nursing home, wh.
offers a variety of adjuvant therapies including music therapy. The
point of music therapy is to use music to help people with
neurological problems to focus and find workarounds for their
condition. Music, for example, is a tremendous help in memorizing
words--all of us know that a poem is much easier to remember when it
is sung. So people with stutters or word-finding difficulties can be
and are helped by using musical mnemonics to get around the places
they get stuck. Similarly, music can help with coordinating motions,
retrieving memories, and so on.
That's what music therapy is, and does. It has a long, long history,
and it works. A lot of us have a visceral negative reaction to the
sight of a bunch of gorked-out elders vaguely trying to get through
Mary Had a Little Lamb--but the fact is that this stuff helps them.
The point is good medicine, not good music.
I have no problem with music therapy for people who can hear.
The studies I read were all about Music Therapy for totally deaf people.
But deaf people can still feel vibrations. Just because the nerve
pathways to the brain from the ear don't allow them to sense sound the
same way that hearing people do doesn't mean that they don't respond to
the sounds.
Gallaudet, the college for deaf people had a football team (don't know
if they still do or what play-starting method they currently use), and
instead of the quarterback calling out numbers, a bass drum on the
sideline would be struck forcefully in a predetermined rhythm to signal
the start of the play. The players could all feel the percussion.
I think that music therapy may be very helpful for totally deaf people
in ways many of us who can hear can't begin to imagine.
I think it has been discussed on this list in the past, but I can't
recall for certain, how hearing an orchestra live is in no way
comparable to hearing it, even at the same volume, from loudspeakers,
simply because of the ways in which our bodies respond to all the
vibrations from the live instruments. Loudspeakers can't reproduce that
effect. That's not hearing, that's physical response to the vibrating
air, and even deaf people can feel that.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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