A Study of a Relational Communication Process in Music Therapy

This study analyses the communication process in music therapy conceived as a continuous process in which music therapist and patient are involved. In this study we use the Alan Fogel’s Relational Coding System (2000) to examine a communication process in music therapy. Originally this method analyses mother-infant interaction: the dyad is observed as a unique communicative system which evolves dynamically over time. The method describes forms of communicative processes that are qualitatively different by means of a series of interaction categories. In order to study the role of musical interactions in the communication process we will add the term “musical” to the different categories when the dyads use sounds or music to communicate. Another dimension of the analysis is the identification of frames that are large segments of coactions that have a coherent theme and lead to specific forms of co-orientation between the participants. The main aim of this research is to carry out a study of musictherapist-patient relationship evolution. This study entails two different analysis:1) a longitudinal analysis of duration and sequences of different categories; 2) the identification of frames and the analysis of their historical development. The present study is based on the codification of 37 videotape recordings of weekly individual sessions of music therapy. The children aged between six and eleven, who took part in these sessions, have diagnosis concerning expressive, communicative and relational disorders. The analysis of the videotape recordings is carried out by three couples of music therapists. The inter-coder agreement is verified on 20% of time of the videotape recordings. Main analyses concerns the differences between duration of different categories during the music therapy process. This analysis was developed separately for each one and for all the dyads and showed statistically significant results. Particularly, statistical analysis demonstrates that duration and sequences of different categories depends on session’s order. As far as the frame is concerned we observed a prevalence of musical frames over non musical ones. Historical analysis of frames shows an increasing complexity of the communication process. The frame and category concepts of this method allow us to describe and analyse the specific characteristics of the communicative process in music therapy