The healing powers of music works in many different ways.
20 years ago, Kamile Geist was working with a 9-year-old boy in Texas who had not yet said his first word, when one day, while she was singing the ABCs, he found his voice.
“One day, out of the blue, he moved his mouth while I was singing. Immediately, I adjusted the song to his tempo and volume and added time within the song for him to fill in the blank,” said Geist, associate professor of music therapy at Ohio University. “By the end of the session, he sounded out every letter. It wasn’t perfect speech, of course, but I saw that there was meaning and awareness behind his expressive speech.
“(His mom) came to me and said ‘I heard it was you’ and I said, ‘It’s not me, it was a team effort,’ ” Geist said. “But she goes, ‘You just have no idea, he’s never said ‘mom’ and he’s 9 years old.’ ”
Geist would eventually take those experiences to OU, which is known as one of the oldest music-therapy programs in the nation and is the only school in Ohio with a music therapy graduate program.
Using the power of music and the skill of a therapist, music therapy can be designed to promote wellness, manage stress, alleviate pain, express feelings, enhance memory, improve communication and promote physical rehabilitation, according to the American Music Therapy Association.
Glidden Hall houses a music-therapy clinic on the sixth floor that is open to everyone, but specializes in working with children and adolescents with disabilities.
Geist said she hopes to see the clinic expand to include group therapy, more individualized care and services to people of all age groups.
“I want to use music to help people,” said Calvin Yue, a first-year masters student new to OU’s graduate music-therapy program. “I really enjoy the people in the program. I absolutely love ... Geist because she can really understand people who have autism, and I’m on the spectrum, too.”
Geist said that she could see the clinic growing because they have developed a very strong network of music therapists in the area, willing to work diverse groups of people.
“My favorite population to work with is children with autism,” Geist said. “I’ve worked with children and I’ve helped them learn how to speak.”
The program is funded through the Athens Community Music School, Geist said, with community members paying for services provided to their child or adult diagnosed with a disability.
Geist said that people do things because of the music that they wouldn’t do in other therapies, and that’s what keeps her coming back.
“My favorite thing is getting to meet a lot of people,” said Amy Dunlap, a first-year graduate student assistant for the music therapy program and a 2008 OU graduate. “And learning from them and helping them to experience more joy or more peace.”
The University of Oregon didn’t offer the music therapy program to Yue, who hopes to help people with the teaching method.
“I really think I can help people through this program, I really think so,” Yue said.
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