Encourage children to investigate ‘nature’s orchestra’ by listening to the sounds around them when they’re outdoors. Ask them to imitate what they’ve heard and compose their own music inspired by the sounds of nature. We find both conditions present, at different times, in all our children” (Maratos, 1998, p. 206). This approach, adapting a psychoanalytic treatment which avoids diagnosis of the cause of the disorder, leads to a form of active and intimate ‘relational therapy,’ which does not rely on verbal formulation of anxieties and lack of trust. Bernstein applied the new technology of movie photography to make refined ‘cyclographic’ diagrams of displacements of body parts, from which he analyzed the forces involved to fractions of a second.
Discoveries were made that challenged the theory that infants had no minds, no sense of self, and therefore no sense of others (Zeedyk, 2006; Reddy, 2008). Most astonishing, and dismissed with derision by convinced rational mind-separate-from-body constructivists, was the finding that infants activate the many parts of their body with an exquisite sense of time, and that they can use the rhythms of expression skilfully to imitate in inter-synchrony with attentive responses from an adult . Infants have no language to learn what other humans know, or what ancestors knew.
Anticipating Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology he also argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding that we know only what we directly experience. He held that inductive reasoning and causality cannot be justified rationally, rather we follow custom and constant relations between ideas rather than logic. He concluded that we do not have a ‘conception of the self,’ only sensations of being alive. Following his teacher Hutcheson , he believed that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles. In the example presented in Figure 5A we see a consistent rigidity of expression and a lack of self-confident invention on the part of a mother suffering from BPD .
However, the practice of music therapy is more than the therapeutic use of preverbal protomusic, however, important this is. Reflecting our discussion above on music and education, music therapy is also making use of the cultural forms of our musicality, and the power these cultural forms have within our psyche (for example, Donald, 1991; MacDonald et al., 2002; Stern, 2010). After describing ‘old me’ the client’s body relaxed, they looked up from the floor, hands lifted from their lap, the volume of their voice increased, its pitch lifted, and they began talking of ‘new me.’ ‘New me is more rational about life.
The judging panel includes musicians Martyn Ware, Sam Lee, Supriya Nagarajan and poet Zena Edwards. Psychiatrist and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary has presented a brilliant review of behavioral and brain research, and a clear conception of complementary consciousness in the two cerebral hemispheres. “Music”, he writes, “being grounded in the body, communicative of emotion, implicit, is a natural expression of the nature of the right hemisphere” (p. 72). https://www.wikipedia.org/ All animal life depends on motivated movement – the urge to explore with curiosity – to move towards food with anticipation, to move away from a predator with fear, to interact playfully with a trusted friend (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Panksepp and Biven, 2012; Bateson and Martin, 2013). A great achievement of modern science of the mind was the discovery by a young Russian psychologist Nikolai Bernstein of how all consciously made body movements depend upon an ‘image of the future’ .
To explore the place of sound and language, and the sound of language, in our understanding of the world around us, Tom meets the writer Robert Macfarlane, whose books about landscape, nature, memory and travel include Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and Landmarks. We also hear from the director Jennifer Peedom, who has collaborated with Macfarlane on Mountain, a new film commissioned https://www.artmindfestival.com/ by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Humans have probably seen themselves as part of the harmony of the natural world for 100,000’s of years if any of the survival tribal wisdom is anything to go by. Aboriginal australian tribes will go as far as to say that humans sing the world into existence as they walk along the ancient song lines that criss cross the land connecting places and spaces.
The pediatrician Sander, (1964, 1975; republished in Sander, 2008) recognized that an infant and caregiver create a coherent system of actions regulated with feelings of vitality in shared time. This dynamic collaboration was also discovered by Daniel Stern when he examined recordings of a mother playing with her three-month-old twins . Intrinsic to the sociability of this intelligence of movement is sensitivity for the exploration of the future, which is woven into our creation and experience of music.
MembershipBack to topThis project is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Scottish Natural Heritage. The easiest way to know you’re seeing/hearing a Sedge Warbler however is, without a doubt, its loud and long sequences of various sounds. Visually there’s not a lot of clues to help, but that distinct and quite long off-white supercilium is obvious at a fair distance. That is if the bird isn’t calling/singing from low down in a reed bed!
Lastly, we present the work of Katerina Mazokopaki, a developmental psychologist who is a pianist and teacher of piano playing. She made a study of babies in Crete with her professor, Giannis Kugiumutzakis, an expert in analysis of imitative games with newborns . The babies were left alone in a familiar place at home amusing themselves. First they looked surprised; then they looked about as if someone had come into the room; and finally they smiled with delight and started performing with the music, inspired by the pulse and melody, joining the music with their different abilities to dance and sing . “For an infant to enter into the sharing of meaning he has to be in communication, which may be another way of saying sharing rhythm….