The Study Of Effectiveness Of Improvisational Music Therapy On Autistic Children's Sociability

Improvisational music therapy is one means of music therapy. Therapists use voice and musical instruments to establish non-verbal and verbal communication with the clients, so that the clients can fully express themselves and explore themselves without any constraint, and help themselves to make changes. As early as in 1970s, the founder of improvisational music therapy-Alvin, had already applied improvisational music therapy on treatment with mentally handicapped children, and achieved remarkable results. Today, improvisational music therapy is very common in Europe and in the United States. However, improvisation music therapy is seldom practiced in mainland China.Based on the analysis of related domestic and overseas literature, this study explores the process, structure and content of semi-structured short-term improvisational music therapy. It employs the methodology of combination of experimental design and case studies to examine the effectiveness of using semi-structured short-term improvisational music therapy to improve social skills of autistic children. This study is divided into three parts: the first part is literatures review; the second part is the main study, the third part is conclusion and outlook.In the first part of literatures review, music therapy's history and research are briefly mentioned; the characteristics of autism children's social cognition are introduced. Then music therapy's research and development status quo at home and abroad, its process as well as its application on the treatment of autistic children are explored.The second part is the main study. The study methodology employs a controlled experiment design: scores from both the experiment and control groups are taken before and after the intervention for comparison. All subjects are autistic child aged below 6, coming from a Shanghai autism training institution. After 18 sessions of improvisational music therapy, the results show that language/communication, cognition, behavior and sociability in the experimental group were significant improved, while the control group in 4 areas of the above has no significant change. This study focused on using improvisational music therapy as treatment on autistic children's sociability. With the help of video recording of the whole therapy process, as well as the analysis of qualitative data collected from the interviews of parent and teachers before, during and after the intervention, the study has shown that improvisational music therapy helps autistic children to improve the level of sociability.Part three is conclusion and outlook. Conclusions of the study are as follows: the, structure and process of semi-structured short-term improvisational music therapy are strongly operable; improvisational music therapy can enhance the capacity of autistic children's sociability effectively, has positive effect on music ability, and has positive impact on behavioral changes, with a good social validity.Finally, recommendations for future research to better the effectiveness of improvisational music therapy are made.