Generating Content - Things to Think About in This Age of Music Therapy

Yesterday, I spent my morning attending a series of webinar trainings offered by the Kansas Department of Education and our local Public Broadcasting Service stations all about things to think about when making video content for educational purposes. It was an interesting morning and went over many of the things that I've encountered over the years that I've been making content for music therapists. It inspired me to try some more stuff, so keep an eye out on the blog and the website for information about new videos...

I found myself thinking about the discussions that I heard yesterday up to and through my sleeping last night. I ruminated on one thing that was mentioned by one of the presenters - content should be only about 4-5 minutes long for each segment.

I started thinking about Sesame Street and how this rule was definitely part of their programming and then wondered if it was due to the attention span of young viewers or if the Street had programmed young viewers to want short bits of attention. After ruminating on this for more time than it really warranted, I decided that there were elements of both ideas that seemed to be relevant. I am sure that the folks at Sesame Workshop watched kids and decided that they could only handle learning information for four to five minutes at a time and then all of the learning ideas were presented in bits and bites. Then, all of us who were raised with Sesame Street got used to receiving our information in those same bits and bites. I wonder if we needed to have short segments only or if we could have used more information in longer times.

As a society, I think that we have fallen out of the practice of paying attention to things for longer than a segment.

(Tongue in cheek here...and, I admit, it is a bit snarky) If you have been able to read through until this paragraph, nice work!

So, if the recommendation is to produce segments that are no longer than five minutes long when making videos, what does that mean for us as music therapists?

I don't know about you, but I often develop therapeutic music experiences (TMEs) that are only designed to take about that amount of time from start to finish. Often, the TMEs take a bit longer than that in implementation, but there are times when five minutes per TME is reaching.  So, I guess that the idea that each segment should only be five minutes long is not all that unrealistic. I just wonder how much we rely on this type of information delivery system - I will be looking a bit more at the television shows that I watch to see if scenes are shaped this way in the shows that I like. I know that songs on the radio fit this type of format - most are about 3.5 minutes long...hmmm. Is this a conspiracy trying to make us unable to pay attention to anything??

Oop, kinda went down the rabbit hole there, but things like this make me wonder.

Okay, to sum up, I am thinking about making some short segments about music therapy for music therapists. Check out my current music therapy videos on my YouTube channel. If you want to see videos as they are uploaded, then hit the subscribe button and the notification bell. Every click moves me closer to getting a customizable URL through YouTube, so please subscribe!!