The psychology of the experience of music

Juslin and Sloboda&s;s writing in Music and Emotion has much that is relevant to thinking about music in psychotherapy. It focuses on different types of studies of music and emotion within society, moving nearer still to exploring listening to music within psychotherapy. The method used by Sloboda and O&s;Neill was the experience sampling method in which the participants carried electric pagers with them at all times during waking hours. The participants were paged once every two hours between 0800 and 2200 hours. Patients in such groups may be suffering from cerebral palsy or other severe neurological or psychological impairment and they may not be in an appropriate mental or neurological place to make a choice of which music to listen to. Using music within psychotherapy teaches us that a patient&s;s musical experiences described at the time of adolescence are very significant.