Movin and Groovin

A picture of the Dell Children’s medical center of central Austin taken from outside.

Photo courtesy to Walker Engineering

Being sick sucks. Everyone can agree with that. If you don’t personally know someone who is having to battle a disease, chances are they know someone else who’s been struggling through an illness.

When treating a disease, such as cancer, there are some common forms of treatment that most people know, such as chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, transplants, etc. However, there’s a new kind of remedy that’s been combined with these treatments to help engage and speed up recovery. It’s becoming a much more popular treatment, only instead of focusing on science, it relies on the power of music. Music therapy, which is a type of therapy involving the use of music and musical instruments, is a useful and creative outlet for hospitalized patients in our modern time. By giving music therapy patients access to such a wide range of different musical instruments, they’re given an opportunity to find what they enjoy. Along with this, the instruments are also able to be used to help patients with more goal-oriented treatments.

Candice Deshler, a music therapist at the North Austin Music Therapy Center, helps explain the effect that music therapy has from a much more medical standpoint.

“There’s an instrument called a melodica, which is a keyboard that you blow into,” Deshler said. “[It’s] to help with things like breath support, [and] requires you to blow into the instrument as you’re pressing the keys down in order to make sounds. We’re using the instruments, not so that we’re improving the musicality of what we’re doing, but so we’re using the instruments to achieve some other type of treatment objective.”

Deshler always believed music had a large impact on her life while she was growing up, but didn’t consider it to be a factor in her career choice. She

had always had intentions of joining the therapy field, and it wasn’t until the start of her junior year in high school that she heard about music therapy from her band teacher. After doing some of her own research, she was inspired by the various ways music therapy had helped people recover, and decided she wanted to be a music therapist.

Nicole Valerioti, a music therapist who works for Dell Children’s Medical Center, gives a better understanding of how a music therapy session functions. Whether a patient is into rock, hiphop, classical, jazz, or a different genre of music entirely, music therapists create sessions that are unique to the patients they’re with. It helps implement each individual’s music interests and aids in improving their overall health too.

“The first thing I say when I’m introducing services to a new patient is, ‘You get to be the boss of music therapy,’” Valerioti said. “The beauty of music therapy in a traumatic place like the hospital is the outlet it provides for emotional expression, for control, for fun, for pain relief, for self-esteem, and for mood elevation.” Two patients with the same taste in music may have completely different ways of expressing themselves. Some might want to sing a song they like, while others play new instruments. They could also enjoy listening to their favorite music or writing their own songs to dance to.

“Each unique person’s preferred music means that no two sessions are the same in pediatric music therapy,” Valerioti said. “We all identify with this very normal thing, but in our own unique way. Music therapists capitalize on this in our sessions, and our job is to use that patient’s music to help them reach their goals in the hospital.”

Music therapy is a treatment not restricted to a single age group, which brings a lot of different music types between generations. However, each music type can still hold some similarities.

Claire Kendrick is also someone who has experienced these different music tastes across the different varieties of her patients and their ages.

The sheer amount of diversity that’s present in each person’s music taste, age, and how they like to enjoy music, shows the unique range of each person that a music therapist can work with. This goes to show that there is so much to discover once you dig deeper into what musical therapy entails. Kendrick agreed that she’d always been interested in different music and genres growing up, and being able to discover new and interesting music is something that she believes has affected her life significantly.

“I definitely have been surprised by some music that I ordinarily wouldn’t listen to,” Kendrick stated. “Even if I don’t get personal enjoyment out of it, I can listen to it from

“It’s up to the patient,” Valerioti said. “There is no one size fits all. When we walk into a room, our first and foremost point of care and attention is learning about that individual, about that child, and what kinds of music they like.”

“I have to learn songs that maybe I’ve never heard before or listen to genres that I normally wouldn’t listen to, [all in order to] learn music that [my patients] like,” Kendrick said. “Any genre of music has been fair game because everyone has different music tastes. It’s really any and all genres of music from all different ages.”

Nicole Valerioti, a Music

Therapist for Dell Children’s

Hospital, holding her guitar. Photo courtesy of Dell Children’s

a theoretical perspective. It has broadened my awareness of different types of music and why people like music.”

Along with the different types of patients helped by music therapy, this quick-spreading treatment is also able to treat several different medical issues that span across patients. Multiple patients might share similar illnesses, but have music tastes that couldn’t be more different from each other. This is a prime example of how unique a person’s music taste is and why music therapists need to understand the interests of each of their patients.

Music therapy, and more specifically music as a whole, has an unparalleled effect on people throughout the entire world. Implementing music

“Some of the clients that I’ve seen have been in physical therapy, and they might have made some progress, but they’re at more of a plateau,” Kendrick said. “Then, when we add music, all of a sudden they can move their fingers easier which is helpful for them to grab things and feed themselves in ordinary life. [It also helps them] work on things such as executive functioning and making decisions. It’s stuff you can see in real-time.”

into therapy has many benefits that Kendrick has seen in her own experiences.

There is evident proof that there are benefits to people who’ve experienced music therapy, but another important reminder with

Claire Kendrick, a music therapist at the Center for Music Therapy here in Austin.

Photo credit to Center for Music Therapy

music therapy is that it’s not a prescription.

“There aren’t necessarily musical diagnoses,” Deshler said, “It’s not, ‘If you have this condition, if you have this illness, you should listen to pop music or you should listen to these artists.’ It’s not a prescribed bubble in that sense. You really want to take the music that is going to resonate with the person who you’re working with.”

Music is such a diverse topic that measures differently to people, and the same goes for people that have these illnesses. Two people that play the same sport may not necessarily like the same music, and neither would two people that work the same job. It makes sense that it wouldn’t change just because it takes on a medical setting.

“The types of strategies that we’re looking at when we’re going through a music therapy session are where we’re singing, we’re playing, we’re using movement, [and we’re utilizing] listening activities,” Deshler said. “Everything that we do is broken down into those categories. There are obviously very strong therapeutic benefits for all of those different things.

Deshler also talks about the different forms of music therapy that can be used to benefit patients from a recovery standpoint.

While music can be therapeutic to a lot of people, it only becomes music therapy when done with a board-certified music therapist. The impact that it has can grant people a more enjoyable experience than they might have otherwise never received.