Self-experiential learning – a research study into music therapy students’ perspective. Sounds that resonate with the personality

In this paper I presented a part of my PhD-study in music therapy: “A Field of Resonant Learning. Self-experiential training and the development of music therapeutic competencies: a mixed methods investigation of student experiences and professionals’ evaluation of their own competencies”.
In the paper I briefly described how self-experience and personal therapy is implemented as a mandatory part of the Music Therapy training program in Aalborg, Denmark. The self-experience-disciplines are implemented as compulsory part inside the programme, with much weight from the very beginning of the training.
The purpose of my study was to explore and generate understanding and insight into the phenomena of self-experience and personal therapy in training, first and foremost from the students’ perspective. Secondly the phenomenon of self-experiential learning was contextualised clinically by investigating how Danish professional music therapists evaluate the impact of their earlier self-experiential training on their current clinical competencies.
In this paper I focused on presenting the qualitative part of my research which addresses the first part of the purpose about the students’ experiences. Semi-structured qualitative interviews and qualitative music analyses were conducted, using a hermeneutic approach. The nine music therapy students who participated were enrolled in the fifth year of their Master’s degree training programme. They were asked to bring a recording of an improvisation of their own choice to the interview, as an artefact from the process of self-experience. The qualitative data collection of text and music was followed by an arts-based interpretation for each of the students, as well as a theoretical level of interpretation across data from all students.
I presented the artistic level of interpretation of data called ‘improvisation narratives’.