Did you ever wonder how music works? This course provides free video, audio and journal resources that explain six basic principles about how music can influence individual and community health and wellbeing. From biology and neuroscience, to psychotherapy and politics, the ways we engage with music can make all the difference. Music has always played an integral role in the lives of individuals and communities all around the globe. This course explores the ways that music can be used to achieve positive changes with a particular emphasis on the most vulnerable persons. Six different understandings will be explored, each with their own set of values and assumptions. The greatest thinkers in each approach believe that their way of explaining the power of music is right, but we will show that understanding music in its entirety delivers the best results in each unique circumstance. Once we understand the various ways that music can change the world, we can make informed decisions about how best to employ its extraordinary power. Learners who engage in this MOOC can expect to both deepen and broaden their understanding of how music can be used with individuals, groups and communities. Specifically: • To distinguish between how music works on the body, in the brain, through the unconscious, for bonding, as political action and in reflecting culture, • To design practical programs that utilise music to support individuals, groups and communities based on examples shared in the ‘on-site’ case studies. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/jnde3w3
Being present in music
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From the course by The University of Melbourne
How Music Can Change Your Life
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From the lesson
How can music foster intimacy to strengthen relationships?
Have you ever used music to try and improve a relationship in your life? Playing the right background music is one thing, but what about singing with another person, or improvising on musical instruments in responsive and caring ways. Listening is the key to intimacy in any relationship and music can be the perfect vehicle to explore listening in new ways. We explore intimacy between parents and infants, therapists and clients and the ways that music therapists engage in musicking with people to build relationships that help.
Meet the Instructors
Katrina Skewes McFerranProfessor
Melbourne Conservatorium of Music
I wonder if it might be nice for you to share a case example.
>> One is a, he was a client in his
40's and he was in the process of change.
he was in a particular process of change that he was finding difficult.
And he was moving from a position of wanting to please everyone,
trying to move towards a place where he could express himself more freely and
disagree with people.
And express his point of view and not feeling that might be
objectionable to someone just because he expressed a point of view.
And this particular client, I got them permission to record a session
and there's a particular environment in it that I've focussed in on.
In writing I've been doing recently and also some presentations I've done some
years ago, where he started talking about old me and new me.
So, the old me was the one who was concerned that if he disagreed
with someone our relationship might crumble to pieces.
It might be catastrophic if he disagreed with someone.
The new me was someone who was much more
robust in their relationships, understanding that if he were to express
himself freely that our relationship could be enriched by that.
It is interesting as I was saying that you sat up more straight.
>> Yeah, I felt that.
Yeah. [LAUGH] >> That you yourself were expressing that
more an upright strong way of facing the world.
>> Yeah. >> It's why the stuff's so beautiful.
It just happens.
We relate to the world through our bodies.
And when you talk about old me the pitch plot.
So, the, as well as spectrographs,
you can create pitch plots, and they're a close cousin to spectrographs.
And the pitch plot for the old me was quite droopy and
fairly flat, and not much activity at all.
And he started talking about new me, the pitch plot started moving up and
down much more and there's much more vitality in it.
>> Yeah. >> And that was a lovely expression of,
not just that moment in time, but his developing
on that aspect of himself that had those qualities of far greater vitality.
And being far more willing to move into space just as his voice was doing.
It was taking up more space as he talked and
from memory also his body took up more space as he, as his voice did.
And so, what as a therapist, what I can do is that I can comment upon it.
Help in a way that doesn't make him self-conscious of it.
Do you notice the way that you have physically embodied this
new way of being as you just did in that second.
>> Yeah. >> And in that body sense and
he almost enjoying a bit on the work of using Gamblin who's written on focusing.
So that felt sense of his body, can he use that as a way to
remember what it's like to be in the world like that.
So can he remember that sense of what it feels like to sit more upright?
To use his voice in a way that penetrates the world more
forcefully and if he starts to forget what it's like,
can he remember back to the felt sense of it and reconnect with it.
And then that embodied
reality would then start to express itself in the way he acts in the world.
>> That's so beautiful.
And I'm thinking also another one of the units that we are covering is how music
might reflect the psyche.
And the difference between these two perspectives is that in a psychoanalytic
perspective it roots back to history to uncover,
which I'm sure you've got no problem with.
But what you're focusing on is present moments.
>> I do [CROSSTALK].
>> Yeah, so it's really nice to emphasise the difference between
those two ways of understanding music and musicality.
One which is a reflection of that which is deeply located in history, and
one which doesn't deny that but actually focuses on the now.
And how being in the present is a powerful way to work
towards change and particularly in strengthening relationships.
>> And to reckon Daniel Stern again, he's brought present moment
in psychotherapy in everyday life, it's a point it keeps returning to.
But the present is a very,
very rich moment that encapsulates more than we could possibly imagine.
And he talks about an exercise he does with people sometimes,
he talks with your, get them to talk about their breakfast.
Do you know this?
>> No. >> Okay, so he gets people to
talk through their experience of when they were conscious having breakfast.
And there will be bits of breakfast you probably won't remember, and
somehow the butter emerged on the kitchen table, but
you can't quite remember how it got there.
You know you must of got it from the fridge but
you really can't remember doing it.
But maybe you remember it when you open up the butter and the butter's a bit soft and
you think, maybe the fridge isn't working very well.
Happened to me at the moment because my fridge hasn't been working very well.
>> [LAUGH] >> And so and
then I'll have a response to that butter being soft.
It might be, it might be a tiny bit of outrage,
how dare the fridge let me down, but
surely the world supports me in everything I do, I've been let down by this.
That might this last for two seconds, and he gets people to tell the story of
their breakfast again and again and again, they go over the same events.
They retell it, and then he starts ref-ing it.
And he with the person they start graphing the length of present moment experiences
which he says is something around 3, 5, 6 seconds.
So the present moment has a duration.
Otherwise the present moment is endlessly irreducible.
So it's something you could never capture because it's most of the time almost.
So the present moment as lived experience, which he uses the Greek term Chyros.
It's something that's flowing from the past, into the future.
And it lasts for a certain duration, you have an experience in the present.
And he'll get people to draw their vitality contours over that.
So it might be a contour of how dare the fridge let me down and
then it goes away again.
[LAUGH] >> And there might be various emotions
that are expressed through time like that, through the duration of having breakfast.
And he says in those little moments you get people reenacting their world views.
And so it might be I had this belief or outrage that something should let me down.
Yet if I look at it again, well, why shouldn't the fridge malfunction?
Why should it keep going forever?
Who am I to think that my fridge was better than anyone else's?
And who am I to believe that I can eat as much butter as I like and
never put on any weight?
So these beliefs that we
hold start to get enacted in the every day present moments of our life.
And through something as banal as breakfast, we can start to notice
the approaches we have to life and maybe unpack them somewhat.
And revisit them and refine them if we find they're not as helpful and
supporting as we might like them to be.
So that's a long way of saying that the present
moment captures a person's history.
And you don't necessarily have to revisit the past to capture it,
because it's happening right now.
>> And certainly it means that you're not trapped in history either.
That that's deeply relevant, that you can re-experience yourself in the now,
and not be reduced to what was.
>> And through doing that we can start to drill down further into it.
And, continue the work that might have stopped many years ago perhaps.
Which to go back to music, you enable the piece to continue.
So maybe the piece halted and so
that big dramatic peak moment in the work suddenly stopped.
And it might of stopped 10, 20, 30 years ago and so
how do you enable the piece to continue on so as not to go back to some
pre-existing state of mental health or sanity or whatever you want to call it.
Is to continue the journey so that the peace may continue and
you can keep living and building on your past experiences,
just as a piece of music builds on its past experience, on its past expressions.
>> I can really hear in everything that you say the way that you see interaction
between people in an inherently musical way, just as a child and a parent
encounter one another in this gooing and gaaing and sticking out tongues.
So naturally, as a way of moving through time and how that changes.
And I can hear how you'll be sitting with people and
you're able to hear them expressing their narrative across time.
And the ways that you're both bringing their awareness to how they're doing that
through their musical gestures whilst also being really present
to the potentials that it holds for the new melody to emerge.
I think that's a beautiful way of both how you explain it and
how you theorised about it.
It's just been wonderful to hear you talking about it.
I'd like to take the opportunity to say thank you.
>> Thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to talk about it.
>> [LAUGH].
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