Physiological change, communication, and the playing of improvised music: Some proposals for research

Abstract

In our music therapy research (Aldridge, 1988b; Aldridge & Vemey (1988) one of the areas we have considered is what happens when people improvise music together. Our intention is to be able to demonstrate to ourselves and other practitioners the influence we believe music therapy has on the body of the patient. We hope to demonstrate, in our later investigations, the mutual relationship of physical changes in the therapist and patient during the process of improvising music together. In trying to demonstrate this change we have looked for a simple physiological indicator. From a preliminary review of the literature about communication, suitable indicators emerged from the studies of cardiovascular change. The principal measures in such work were those concerned with changes in blood pressure and heart rate. Heart rate was chosen because it was a relatively easy parameter to observe and measure. Perhaps more significantly, it was a parameter acceptable to medical science with whom we, as a therapeutic discipline, are attempting to promote a dialogue. An earlier paper (Aldridge, 1988a) mentioned the important factors associated with both biological form and musical form-time, phrasing, pitch, rhythm, and melodic contour. Similar considerations apply for studies of communication. The basic preverbal fundamentals of human communication are called suprasegmentals-these are time, phrasing, rhythm, pitch, and voice tone (which would more accurately be called timbre). It is these qualities that are considered by music therapists when they assess tape-recorded sessions of improvised music therapy. The literature that first alerted us to these factors concerned chronic heart disease and Type A behavior (Dielman et al., 1987; Dimsdale, Stem, & Dillon, 1988; Friedmann, Thomas, Kulick-Ciuffo, Lynch, & Suginohara, 1982; Linden, 1987; Lynch, Long, Thomas, Malinow, & Katchor, 1981; Smith & RhodeWalt, 1986). Heart disease patients were described in terms that owed as much to a musical basis as they did to a physiological process. Loud, fast speech using a limited range of voice timbre, and speech patterns that interrupted the responses of a partner, appeared to reflect qualities music therapists heard in their descriptions of patients when they creatively improvised music (see Table 1). Although these qualitative descriptions may only be regarded as noise in the formal terms of grammar, they provide the essential expressive context for communication. It seemed important to compare apparently similar statements from two different theoretical backgrounds to see if there was any commonality between them. As heart disease is such an important problem in both mortality and morbidity throughout the Western world, it made sense to propose how a discipline like improvised music therapy could offer a tool for both assessment and treatment. The medium of improvised music offers possibilities for extremely varied communication and has a