Halloween Soundscape
Spooky season is upon us! Fall and Halloween are great opportunities for creating unique musical experiences as there are many songs people associate with this time of the year, and the music itself is full of interesting elements-minor keys, spooky or silly lyrics, sound effects, unique instruments, and so on. It can be a fun time for kids to experience these songs as they prepare for trick-or-treating, Halloween parties, and perhaps dressing up for the first time. For adults, it can elicit nostalgia and be a great time to bring back the classics like “Ghostbusters”, and “Monster Mash” to trigger positive memories of celebrating Halloween as kids, with their kids, and so on. Overall, it’s such a fun time of the year!
Some of my favorite interventions to do at this time of the year are soundscapes or musical stories. They include a storyline or narrative in which clients choose instruments to be characters in the story or sound effects in the story, working on executive functioning skills of problem-solving, self-expression, decision-making, and collaboration if they are working in a group. My two favorite songs to use for this are:
The Little Old Lady Who Wasn’t Afraid of Anything by Music with Mar, based on the book by Linda Williams and Megan Lloyd. In this story, an old lady walks through the forest and is confronted by different enchanted objects that make sounds, such as two shoes saying “Clomp, clomp,” and a shirt saying, “shake, shake.”
The intervention usually follows these steps:
The music therapist encourages clients to choose instruments that could be each of the objects or follow along by doing body movements such as clapping their hands or shaking their body.
The music therapist sings the song and prompts the clients to play their instruments when they hear their object in the story.
Potential goal areas for this intervention include: problem-solving, decision-making, attention skills and following directions.
AND
Haunted House by the Learning Station. In this song, the listener walks through a haunted house and encounters different Halloween characters, including a goblin, skeleton, vampire, and werewolf.
The intervention usually follows these steps:
The music therapist encourages the clients to choose an instrument to represent each character mentioned in the song
The music therapist sings the song and prompts the group to play when they hear their character in the lyrics.
Potential goal areas for this intervention include: problem-solving, decision-making, attention skills and following directions. There is also a dance in the song, so they can follow along with the movements to continue working on following directions if appropriate.
Check out the video below to hear “The Haunted House” in an example of a soundscape we use in music therapy sessions!
This blog was written by Angie Stensaas, MM, MT-BC.
