The Arts in Psychotherapy 39 (2012) 456–464 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect The Arts in Psychotherapy Music technology usage in music therapy: A survey of practice  Nicole D. Hahna, Ph.D., MT-BC * , Susan Hadley, Ph.D., MT-BC, Vern H. Miller, MT-BC 1 , Michelle Bonaventura, BM 2 Department of Music, Slippery Rock University, One Morrow Way, Slippery Rock, PA 16057, United States a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Music technology Music therapy a b s t r a c t The purpose of this study was to determine (a) how many music therapists use music technology in their clinical work, (b) trends regarding music technology usage related to gender, age, and/or geographical location, (c) how music therapists acquire knowledge and/or training in music technology, (d) barriers to using music technology in clinical work, (e) types of music technology music therapists currently use, and (f) why music therapists do or do not use music technology in their clinical practice. Participants (N = 600) completed a 27-question survey with a 95% completion rate. The return rates for participants by country were: (a) US 27%, (b) Australia 6%, (c) Canada 9%, and (d) UK 9%. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data were conducted. A majority of the music therapists surveyed (71%, n = 443) reported using music technology in the clinical setting. Differences in technology usage were found according to age and gender of the participants. Most of the participants reported to be self-taught (61%, n = 464). Results of this study indicated that more training in music technology related to clinical practice is needed, with attention given to ways to make more technology accessible to a variety of learners. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Over the past 30 years, we have seen music technology become digital (Leider, 2004), more robust (Holmes, 2008), and more com- pact (Hosken, 2011). Developments in computer technology, such as personal computers and the use of Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) (Huber, 2007; Williams & Webster, 2008), have made music technology portable and accessible in homes (Huber) and in clinical settings (Cevasco & Hong, 2011; Krout, 1994). The rapid growth in digital technology has had a variety of effects. On the one hand, this growth has meant that instead of being acces- sible to only “an elite few, [it is] now infused into many aspects of our contemporary society. . . . on our desks, laps, wrists, belts, and even in our pockets” (Nagler, 1998, p. 41). On the other hand, this rate of expansion means that digital technologies become obso- lete soon after they hit the market. In order to understand the  This research was supported by a faculty-student research grant through Slip- pery Rock University of Pennsylvania. The funding source had no role in the design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, writing, or submission of this manuscript. The authors wish to thank Dr. Wendy Magee for her previous research on this topic and for allowing us to use and adapt her survey questions as the basis for this study as well as Dr. Robyn Cruz and Dr. Melody Schwantes for their assistance with statistical analysis. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 724 738 2447; fax: +1 724 738 4469. E-mail addresses: nicole.hahna@sru.edu (N.D. Hahna), susan.hadley@sru.edu (S. Hadley), vemiller@ppimhs.org (V.H. Miller), mdb9777@yahoo.com (M. Bonaventura). 1 Present address: Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute in Harrisburg, PA, United States. 2 Present address: Pittsburgh, PA, United States. wide variety of ways that technology has been used in music ther- apy to date, we examined the music therapy literature in order to ascertain ways in which technology has been employed in music therapy clinical practice, research, and education. For the purpose of this article, music technology is defined as the activation, play- ing, creation, amplification, and/or transcription of music through electronic and/or digital means. In music therapy clinical practice, digital technology has been used in assessment and evaluation, as well as in treatment. In the early 1980s, music therapists were using computers to collect and analyze behavioral interactions that were observed in clinical treatment (Hasselbring & Duffus, 1981). Music therapists were also using computer-assisted charting programs that were not devel- oped by music therapists, such as SCRIBE, AIMSTAR and EMTEK (Crowe & Rio, 2004; Hasselbring & Duffus; Streeter, 2010). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lee (2000) utilized computer nota- tion software in order to transcribe music therapy improvisations for the purpose of analyzing the musical elements of the client- therapist interactions. By the mid 1990s, CAMTAS, a computer aided music therapy analysis system that organizes data collected from audio and video recordings of music was developed to track the physical activity of clients engaged in musical improvisation over a selected time interval and then to compare progress over sessions (Hunt, Kirk, Abbotson, & Abbotson, 2000; Verity, 2003). At the turn of the century, Gallagher and Steele (2001) developed a computerized database to evaluate music therapy clinical treat- ment with 90 clients receiving palliative care. By 2010, there were several new software programs which were developed by music 0197-4556/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2012.08.001