Just a Song Sunday: It Starts with a Random Song

This morning, I put my iPod on shuffle and took the first song that popped up. (By the way, it happened to be I Like to Move It as performed by Reel to Reel - this is going to be too easy!) I was thinking that I would take any song and demonstrate how I could make it meet client goals and present levels of performance.

For me, this process always starts with the clients. Let's say I am working with a group of older adults who are in post-stroke rehabilitation treatment. Everyone in the group has upper extremity range of motion goals. This song comes on, and I have to make it something that encourages progress on my clients' goals.

(By the way, this song is almost too easy for this group. I'll do another, more difficult group in just a bit.)

There are a couple of things that complicate the use of this song with this group. First of all, it is out of most of the music preferences of the group. It will probably not be extremely familiar to all of my clients, but the song has been played enough in movies and commercials that they will probably have some familiarity with it. The second complication is that the recorded version is at a set tempo which may not allow for changing the element to accommodate people moving at different times, but we can work around that as well.

There are some good things about this song as well. The lyrics are repetitive and encourage people to "move it, move it." There is a steady tempo that is expressed through deep bass pulses and a short bass line. 

So, this song may be a good choice to get folks moving - even older adults who may not be as familiar with this song as other clients.

Let's take this song and place it within a treatment for anxiety. How can this song be used for in this type of treatment? I would never use just this song, as is, to be the treatment for anxiety, but I could use this as part of a sequence of music to assist my client to work through those feelings of anxiety. This song could be the first song in an iso-principle directed playlist - this song would encourage the first step for me - getting out excess energy and tiring the body. The next song would have less movement and more directed thought. I could also use a karaoke version of this song (none of the original lyrics) and ask the client(s) to write their own words to the song based on their own anxiety themes.

If you've been reading these posts, you know that I am a proponent of taking music and making it fit the clients in front of me. This is just one way of thinking about our tool, music. 

If you are invested in the goals and objectives of your clients, then you can take any music and shape it around your clients.

There you go. See you next Sunday!