The Effect of Music Therapy on Speech Independent of Musical Preference

Music therapy is a relatively new form of treatment, so the undiscovered effects on speech specifically are interesting. More specifically, I am looking deeper into the application of music therapy in speech therapy and its benefits. Furthermore, the impact of music void of musical preference of the subject is something left unexamined, so looking into this effect is very intriguing to me. Therefore, The purpose of this research is to look further into the process of music therapy and its application in professional settings. I look to do so through the incorporation of melodies composed of notes from various scales, including major, natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor, and altered scales. This is designed to be void of musical preference when involving scales as it is not based on previous music or songs that the subject would select. My hypothesis is that through these melodies applied to the curriculum as an implementation to their speech therapy, there can be remedial effects independent of the preference of these students. These benefits would be measured through a pre and post test and a statistical significance t-test. This information will be collected through the use of this experiment with elementary children at Chapin Elementary in the speech therapy program. This will be based on performance on a post test after they are exposed to a certain pattern of notes found in different types of scales and see their performance level compared to the pre test without the exposure to music