City Research Online

Abstract

To what extent do different people find the same moments in a music therapy improvisation session salient, and how similarly or differently do they interpret the same moments? Four half-hour sessions at a music therapy center between different trained music therapists and musically experienced first-time attendees were videorecorded. Immediately after the sessions each participant watched the video of their session individually and commented on the one to five moments that struck them as most noteworthy. For each session, two other participants—one trained music therapist and one other musically experienced observer—also watched the videos and commented on one to five noteworthy moments. An online questionnaire for each session was subsequently created that included all four participants’ comments (anonymized and edited for ratability) and the corresponding video segments. Each participant individually rated the extent to which they agreed with all the anonymized comments about their session. Analyses focused on the extent to which different participants selected the same moments as worthy of commentary, their levels of endorsement of comments originally authored by participants in the different roles, and overall patterns of rating agreement between participants in the different roles. Overall levels of agreement were low, but across the four sessions the trained music therapists’ judgments tended to be more aligned with each other's, with some asymmetries: Session music therapists endorsed statements by the commenting music therapists more, but not the other way around. There was also evidence for greater agreement between session outsiders (commenting music therapists and commenting observers) than between session participants (session music therapists and attendees). In fact, by some measures session attendees’ interpretations of what happened were particularly different from everyone else's. The findings are not consistent with a view that everyone is likely to see the same thing in a video clip of a moment in music therapy.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Request permissions for this article.
Publisher Keywords:	Improvisation, interpretation, intersubjectivity, listeners, music therapy, outsiders, overlapping cognition, participation, shared understanding, training
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Population Health & Policy
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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