My name is Sarah Grey and I’m a Registered Music Therapist (RMT), Neurologic Music Therapist (NMT), and performing musician in Canberra, Australia. I own and run Sound Effect Music Therapy in Fyshwick, and have many years of experience facilitating community music and teaching music, too.

Earlier today, I was looking up something on Google relating to music therapy, and the suggested search hit was “Does music therapy actually work?”. Thanks, Google. Yes, music therapy works. It not only works, but it offers a widely-accessible, affordable, enjoyable, non-pharmacological intervention for an enormous variety of applications, ranging from developing motor skills, language and speech skills, cognition, co-ordination and attention, through to just plain feeling better and managing pain. It appears to me that Google’s search suggestions are unlikely to improve unless people like me start writing some balancing content. So, I have decided to start writing a micro blog to offer small, accessible morsels of cited music therapy research to the general public.

There are several other reasons too, though. Academic journals are difficult and expensive to access for the ‘average Joe’, and even if you can gain access the language contained within them is often not easily digestible. By providing mico summaries of the latest research, I hope to advocate for my profession and increase understanding and awareness of the wonderful world of music therapy, and throw some one-liners at Google to help place music therapy in our psyche as a respected, evidence-based, NDIS-funded allied health profession.

As a practicing music therapist, part of my job is to stay up-to-date with the latest research, so I may as well summarise and share my discoveries with you. Of course, there is no substitute for doing your own research, so any of my summaries will contain full citations.