What Happens when Music Therapy Happens: the Dynamics of Music Therapy?

Abstract

This paper presents a bridging theory of music therapy, intended to describe the core concepts of music therapy in an intuitive fashion that is accessible to a multi-disciplinary audience. Calling for a paradigm shift in the way that music therapy is empirically validated, it highlights the difficulty with the protocolization of music therapy for the purpose of randomized control trials. Centred around the phenomenon of entrainment, it proposes a broad definition of the iso-principle and describes what happens when music therapy happens from a dynamical systems perspective. The therapeutic alliance is described analogously to the bond between participatory sense-makers, or two entrained dynamical systems and a selection of video excerpts are used to exemplify how music therapists use the broad iso-principle to entrain with their service users and lead them from one state to another.