I'm a Music Therapist

As a music therapist who’s interested in bridging the gap between the science of music cognition and the art of music therapy, I was super excited to attend the biennial conference of the International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) in San Francisco. Last year was my first time going to a music cognition conference and this year was again filled with awesome talks about how music, behavior, and the mind operate together. I heard talks on topics as diverse as music and LSD, how cochlear implant users perceive music, the entrainment abilities of sea lions, and how babies use music to socialize. Who knew that music cognition was such an eclectic field?

At last year’s conference, I felt very much like an outsider. I showed up without really knowing anyone, and often felt like I was treading among a sea of statistics and jargon that I hadn’t encountered since my undergrad research methods class. What really struck me most about this year’s conference, though, was the emphasis on collaborative forums that brought together people with different areas of expertise. Hearing the perspective of researchers, clinicians, and industry professionals bouncing ideas off each other made me optimistic that music therapists have a lot to contribute to this field’s direction (“smart” instruments for music therapy sessions, anyone?). With that collaborative spirit in mind, I want to share two profound experiences I had during my ICMPC week that helped me find my place as a music therapist in music cognition land.

Discussion and Debate at Philz Coffee

It was the third day of ICMPC and I found myself in line at Philz coffee with two people I had met for the first time at conference. The first was a woman, R, I’ve been working on a major project on for six months, but had never met in person; the second was a man, Y, with whom R had gone to college and ran into coincidentally at the conference. We all have pretty different backgrounds. While I’ve been a music therapist for four years, R is in the middle of her music therapy equivalency degree after studying cognitive psychology, and Y works as a research assistant after finishing his studies in pre-med. But as we sat down with our $4 cups of coffee in hand (gotta hate SF prices), we all brought something valuable to the (literal and figurative) table and the discussion.

Y is an accomplished musician, but didn’t know much about music therapy and was eager to learn more about what we do. R and I did our best to explain music therapy’s diversity in terms of our respective programs’ approaches, psychodynamic versus neurologic. Our conversation swung from how we view music as inducing positive change for our clients to hashing out professional issues like Master’s level entry. Whereas, both R and Y come from research backgrounds my questions for them tend toward understanding how to navigate the scientific community. What is an RDoC and how is it used in diagnosis? What is working in a research lab like? But what we all shared one thing in common: we are young, budding academics who are just starting to juggle all the challenges of the careers we’re throwing ourselves into. Because we are all starting out without publication histories or egos to preserve, we were free to have a fun, casual, but honest talk about each of our fields. This conversation was just the start of building the interdisciplinary ties that I hope will make up my career.

Resonance in Skyspace

It was day four of ICMPC and the schedule gave as the afternoon off to explore San Francisco. This story takes place with me and two others I had recently connected with. R from the story above, and J, a music theorist finishing his PhD in music and embodied cognition that I had met at the music cognition conference a year prior. I was the only one familiar with the city, so I took them to one of my favorite spots in San Francisco: the de Young art museum. For poor grad students such as ourselves, the de Young offers a lot of free stuff including an observation tower and a sculpture garden. As we made our way through the garden, we walked into a domed room by James Turrell called Skyspace.

As we entered the main chamber, we all started experimenting with the resonance of the concrete space (we are musicians, of course). Sort of organically, we started vocally improvising with a technique called “toning” which involves singing elongated pitches on a neutral syllable like “ooo” or “aaah.” I couldn’t help but close my eyes and appreciate the singing resonate around me. There was no conducting or overt communication on any of our parts, just feeling our way through wherever the music led. We toned for about five minutes before our song came to an end. I sat in silence, savoring this moment for a few seconds before blinking my eyes open…to find a dozen other people sitting around with us. I hadn’t even heard them come in!

Luckily, J took a video of us toning, feel free to check it out below:

And this is my most treasured memory from this week. I hadn’t sung so freely like that since an experiential in an undergrad class, maybe 6 years ago. Although R and J were newer friends, singing together allowed us to transcend our exhaustion from the conference, our personal challenges, and create something beautiful that drew in complete strangers. No joke, I could totally feel that warm fuzzy feeling of oxytocin in my system afterward. For me, this moment was a personal check in, a reminder for why I do what I do. Although I traveled all this way to attend a conference dedicated to breaking down and analyzing music’s interactions with the brain, singing with R and J was a pure and intangible moment. Being with the music was enough, without needing to scrutinize why and the how it came about.

Together, these two experiences at ICMPC illustrated to me the importance of learning and being open to experiences with new people and ideas. The first moment at the coffee shop brought me into the thought processes of my friends with a discussion and debate representative of the scientific method; the second allowed me to share and experience the mindset of my friends through the medium that first brought us together—music. I can’t wait to see what awaits me at my next music cognition conference.