Garage Band Part I

Use of Garage Band Program to create Auditory Integration Exercise

Garage band can be used for all kinds of activities in Music Therapy, and it comes standard on all Macintosh computers produced after a certain year, I'm not sure which but the point is, its free with your Mac!*

The most basic use for garage band is as a means of generating rhythms or melodies to use as jumping off points for improvisation activities with clients. There are many loops that come with garage band, including various percussion patterns, lots of different instruments, melodies on piano, guitar, and synthesized 'beats'. These can be great simply to move to in music therapy, and the loops can continue infinitely without variation, so they can be great for use with clients who like familiar or repetitive music. Some of them are also pretty complex. I have used bass lines accompanied with techno beats from garage band in auditory integration exercises, one that I designed for one of 'the siblings' I work with (the older brother), and he excelled with this. I have yet to explore the technique further, but basically it goes like this:

1.  choose a simple bass pattern from the loops included in Garage Band. Loops can be copied directly into a track on Garage Band and can be set to repeat for an infinite number of measures. Decide on a length for your exercise and fill the entire track length with your chosen bass line.

2. Choose additional rhythmic or melodic loops (or record your own) and gradually introduce the layers of sound into your composition. For example: play JUST the bass line for 32 measures, then add a shaker rhythm, fade it in or not. Allow the bass and shaker to play for another 12 bars or so Then, add a more complex rhythm included with the shaker and bass line, this is where I used a 'dance' beat, but obviously you can add anything you'd like! It helps to increase the complexity gradually so that the bass gets more and more difficult to distinguish, but is still audible!

3. Play the track (or just the bass line loop at first to introduce it) for student and imitate rhythm on a hand drum or other percussion instrument. (this can also be expanded if the student is more advanced and can include imitation of melodic contour in addition to the rhythm, but we just used my djembe and copied what we heard!)

2. Play the bass pattern along with the loop/recording for a minute or more, allow the student to imitate the bass line without therapist support (musically) and encourage this. 

3. (here's where garage band comes in because it is so easy to layer composition with the program!) As the track plays through, the student will have to continue to hear the bass part which will require increased ability to meld all the sounds that are being processed and pick out the most 'important' sound (the bass line). Training the brain to be able to distinguish between sounds that must be heard and focused on versus those that may be largely disregarded is an important aspect of auditory integration. 

I should mention that this is in no way a means of completely developing auditory integration skills in a student who struggles significantly with sounds/auditory processing. This should only be practiced by trained professionals and is not an attempt to diagnose or treat any specific condition. It is an exercise that may increase auditory integration skills in music.

 If you have a student who has a very hard time distinguishing sounds within a musical context then it might make sense to include 'non-musical' sounds in the recording. Something I haven't explored yet admittedly, but I like the possibilities!

4. The auditory integration happens when the student is able to process all the sounds 'appropriately' and pick the bass line out and continue to copy it (which, if this is done with a hand drum or other tactile instrument, will also require motor coordination and provide tactile stimulation/vestibular feedback, the possibilities are pretty endless really, but you have to know your student and what he/she can handle safely) while the other musical or non-musical auditory stimuli are present. This activity can be made more challenging by including a changing bass line that the student will have to continue to listen for and imitate throughout the track.

5. The student I work with has been very successful with this activity. It may be his ability to center in on the bass sound and process that as 'foreground sound' versus the additional music playing, and this is an important aspect of auditory integration! I also was informed by his mother that he did receive Auditory Integration Therapy when he was younger, and that he was discovered to have hyper-acusis.

Well, since that turned out to be pretty lengthy, I guess I will make another entry about using the other features in garage band. There is more to come.

Please share any and all ideas!

*( I would recommend Macintosh computers to all music therapists looking to significantly integrate technology into their music therapy practices, I started using Macs in college at Berklee, and they are the preferred operating systems for most modern musicians/music technologists/film score writers etc.)