Music Therapy

Music therapy is a part of rehabilitation and care which works to meet physical, emotional, social and communication needs.  Music therapists are part of the multi-disciplinary team, so music therapy works alongside the other therapy disciplines.

Our trained music therapists provide therapeutic musical stimulation for patients in groups and on a 1:1 basis. They make use of technologies and assessment tools developed at the RHN.

The music therapy techniques used here to help patients recover from brain injury can be divided into four broad categories:

• Physical: techniques that focus on developing physical strength, balance, movement and coordination through following rhythmic patterns.
• Communication: singing familiar songs can help with speech stimulation and improve pronunciation, articulation and projection as well as aid recall of vocabulary.
• Cognitive: playing and listening to music can help patients improve attention, memory and problem solving by use of specific musical activities.
• Psychological: music can enable emotional expression of an individual’s situation, help them come to terms with their disability and aid them in relating to others. This is achieved by making music actively, song writing and song singing.

We don’t expect everyone to compose their own music. However music’s capacity to stimulate both physical and emotional responses means that music therapy is an important part of many patients’ care plans.

“I kept looking at the piano and asked if someone could teach me to play. Then I started to write my own song. It let me stop thinking about the downfalls and start thinking about the upside.”

– Graham, suffered a traumatic brain injury.