Neurological Music Therapy

What is Neurologic Music Therapy?

The Handbook of Neurologic Music Therapy written by Thaut & Hoemberg (2014) delineates the core concept of NMT. They advance it as a shift from the historical understanding of music in therapy and medicine to an evidence-based music therapy practice that is integrated into an interdisciplinary context of rehabilitation offered by Neuromotion.

Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT) is the culmination of music therapy, neurology, and brain sciences and is classified into 20 scientific and evidenced-based music interventions. The techniques are applied using music and rhythm to directly affect cognitive and physical function.

What’s the difference between traditional Music Therapy and NMT?

Traditional music therapy uses music to achieve non-musical goals, the focus is usually on the social/emotional domain.  NMT uses specific and standardized clinical techniques supported by scientific evidence. The 20 techniques are the clinical core of NMT and are defined by diagnostic treatment goals through music perception and music production to achieve these treatment goals.

NMT employs therapeutic music exercises (TMEs) in core areas of training or retraining of the injured brain. These TMEs include physical therapy, speech and language rehabilitation and cognitive training. Music has been shown, through scientific data and insight into music and brain function to access control processes in the brain related to; control of movement, attention, speech production, learning and memory.

These areas can be helped to retrain and recover function to the injured or diseased brain. Research has shown a relationship between music and the brain. There are no “music-specific” brain areas but the effect of music is shown to be highly distributed and hierarchical sharing
“non-musical” cognitive, motor, and language function. Moreover, music processing can engage, train and retrain non-musical and behavior function. NMT operates as a biological core language of the human brain where the function of music is a language of learning and retraining
the injured brain