Improvisational Music Therapy

Music therapy with children with ASD often adopts relationship-based approaches, and therapists often create opportunities for reciprocal interactions, affect sharing, turn taking and joint attention with the underlying aim to foster the child's motivation to interact and relate to others (Thompson, McFerran, & Gold, 2014). Thus music therapy has the potential and creates an opportunity to improve children's social skills, even with non-verbal children with ASD. A number of studies evaluated music therapy as an intervention to improve social skills in children with ASD. Kim, Wigram, and Gold (2008) used improvisational music therapy to assess the effect of music therapy on developing joint attention and positive emotional communication during
individual sessions. The study involved 15 children aged three to five years old with autism, and used an between-conditions and within-subjects design with 12 weekly 30 minutes improvisational music therapy sessions compared with a control condition of 12 weekly 30 minutes play sessions with toy. Improvisational music sessions were shown to be more effective than play sessions in increasing eye contact, turn taking, emotional synchronicity and initiation of engagement. However, generalizability to settings other than the therapy sessions and the maintenance of the improvement were not assessed in this study.