ABSTRACT
A music therapist is sitting with a group of pre-school children and their parents. The therapist, who is a violinist, slowly and quietly takes the instrument out of its case, checks the tuning, tightens the bow and plays a single low sound, one beautiful tone. The sound emerges imperceptibly out of the relative silence, is held constant, rises to a peak of loudness and dies away back into the silence. The children look to the source of the sound, attend to it as if drawn along and sharing in this brief sound journey. The image of a railway track springs to mind, the children on one track, the music therapist and the violin on the other, with the sleepers linking them through the ebb and flow of the sound. No words are spoken, yet the atmosphere in the room changes completely and some form of non-verbal communication has seemingly taken place. This is a simple example of an opening gesture in sound but it contains some of the essential ‘sound elements’ that are the music therapist’s basic tools of the trade. We are assuming that the reactions of the children and the changes in atmosphere have been brought about by the interactions of the fundamental elements inherent in the sound: the unique quality of the sound produced by the violin; the duration of the sound; the growing and fading of the level of loudness and the pitch of the sound. What can science, in particular the psychology of music, teach us about these basic elements? Each is present in any one sound but for simplification we shall start this chapter with a brief survey of the relationship of each sound element to music therapy. Alvin based much of her teaching on a commonsense study of these basic elements of sound, observing that in any collection of sounds there was usually one element in a dominant position.1
