Chapter 20: Globalizing Adolescents
Digital Music Cultures and Music Therapy
A Humanistic Understanding of the Use of Digital Technology in Therapeutic Songwriting
Music Therapy Perspectives, Volume 36, Issue 2, Fall 2018,
Abstract: This article explores the use of technology in therapeutic songwriting from a humanistic perspective focusing on the tenets of cultivating agency, expressing and voicing selfhood, and nurturing stakeholder engagement. Adolescents in the 21st century are using a variety of digital music platforms to (re)create their identities and invent new ways of transforming social discourse. By attuning to the humanistic qualities of digital technology used in therapeutic songwriting, music therapists can provide a space for adolescents who have experienced trauma to discover their potentiality. Songs will be shared for readers to experience how various recording and production techniques can reveal the lived experiences of songwriters within music therapy, as well as to highlight the humanistic tenets of agency, expressing and voicing selfhood, and stakeholder engagement. The need for cultural and ethical responsiveness when creating digital soundscapes with adolescents who have experienced childhood trauma and identify with Hip Hop Culture is discussed.
Abstract: This theoretical paper explores the function, structures, and experience of listening to and creating ambient music, and encountering the ambient mode of being (Jaaniste, 2007). In the ambient mode of being, a listener becomes immersed in the raw materials of sonic environments (soundscapes) and nomadically shifts awareness across the terrains of these environments- simultaneously experiencing being in a liminal space and grounded in the here-and-now. For music therapists this might mean navigating and attuning to the lo-fidelity soundscapes in various levels of health and helping people achieve hi-fidelity and clarity on individual, community, cultural, and spiritual levels of existence. The ambient mode of being suggests that music therapists can access these levels simultaneously by entering into a creative state of listening in which pervasive ambience becomes salient within the musical relationships built in music therapy. Implications of the ambient mode of being for music therapy practice and theory will be explored. Clinical outcomes related to encountering the ambient mode of being are discussed including capturing distant or forgotten parts of one’s self and making them salient again.
Listening in the Ambient Mode: Implications for Music Therapy Practice and Theory
Voices, Vol 14 No 2 (2014)