I will present a scientific paper on the ICMPC 13 - APSCOM 5 in South Korea next week. This is the story on how this came about. Click here to go straight to the abstract ...
In the end of 2010 I’ve met the music therapist Minea Alvsten and was fascinated by the FMT therapy approach. As I heard later, functional music therapy (FMT) is a non-verbal active music therapy, which is focused on the neuropsychological development of patients, evaluated by the observation of the patients' motor skills. The therapist uses music as a tool to communicate with the individually treated person, and to motivate the person emotionally to perceive, react, move, play, and interact.
This description opens up many questions: How does the therapist “communicate” with the patient without using words? What does he do during therapy? And what is he looking for, so what defines improvements of the “patient’s motor skills’”?
As a former student in media computer science and current PhD student in motion analysis I have a special interest in this bodily improvements and how I could record, measure, analyze and visualize them. That’s why I went to Sweden for half a year in summer 2012. I’ve lived in Eskilstuna, 100 km from Stockholm, and worked at the FMT Behandlingscenter Eskilstuna. Together with Margareta and Karina I’ve recorded the motion of 20 patients (10 with Stroke, 10 with Parkinson’s disease) for later analysis. I’ve attended lessons in FMT at the Musikhögskolan Ingesund, 260 km from Stockholm, and learnt Swedish. And I spoke to many inspiring and interesting FMT therapists or just listened to them, e. g. to all the future therapists in Ingesund, to Margareta and Karina, Anita Granberg, Salome Persson, Ulla Sterner, Mikael Walldin, Gunnar Smideman, Lars Persson, Sol-Britt Häggblom, and Jennie Karf. Many thanks to all of you, for your time and effort!
In the course of all these conversations I got an understanding to which motion skills FMT therapist pay attention. And we’ve learned to understand each other, the different ways of thinking, expressing ideas, “therapeutic” and “technical” language. Thus Margareta Ericsson and Karina Larsson from the FMT Behandlingscenter, my doctor supervisors Markus Wacker and Bernhard Jung, and I wrote a scientific paper about how to analyze FMT from both the perspectives of a computer scientist and a FMT therapist. We created a kind of 3d motion data vocabulary which is meaningful, understandable, comprehensible and objectively measurable for our two different working disciplines.
In one week I will have the honor to present our scientific paper at the 13th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition and the 5th Conference for the Asia-Pacific Society for Cognitive Sciences of Music in Seoul, South Korea.
You are cordially invited to listen to my talk on how to analyze FMT using a 3D motion data vocabulary on Friday, the 8th of August in session 9B “Music Therapy: Rhythm and Motor” from 10 to 10:30 am at the Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Here you can find the abstract. Feel free to contact me to discuss your questions and ideas, perhaps during lunch or just anywhere at the conference. I am highly looking forward to get to know you.
This talk is just one further step to develop a computer-assisted analysis software for FMT. If you cannot be on location and are curious for more information just send me an e-mail with your questions or visit my PhD website with further information!
