Rebecca Kelly
Las Vegas, Nevada
Bachelor of Music in Clarinet Performance
Creativity Project Reporting and Reflection

Music Therapy for Animals

My project “Music Therapy for Animals” was about watching an animal’s behavior to 4 various music genres and what volume level were they comfortable with. The 4 music genres are Classical (Mozart), Country (Rascal Flatts), Rap (Ed Sheeran), and Pop (Taylor Swift). Each genre was 15 minutes. I used Mozart’s 8 Variations, K. 613 which was 15 minutes by itself. I used Take Me There, Here, and Help Me Remember by Rascal Flatts. For Ed Sheeran, I used the songs Don’t, Nina, and Take It Back. For Taylor Swift’s songs, I used Blank Space, Out of the Woods, and Style.

At the beginning, I was taking an hour per genre but each genre was spaced apart by a day or more. Later, I reduced my sessions to where I do all genres on a certain volume for about an hour. The volume levels were 100%, 50%, and 25% on my laptop. I was told by Professor Heyborne at Southern Utah University that it is okay to have the music go no higher than 80 decibels. I tested all the music and the highest was 78 decibels. I was looking for music genres that I could test on all types of animals (domestic and/or wild) to see if the music genre calms them down or irritates them. The volume levels also factored into the irritability or calmness of the animal too.

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I was sitting at my piano practicing my major scales and my cat, Princess, came by to listen to me play the piano. I decided to play a minor 2nd (“Jaws” theme) and she started sharpening her claws on the couch. I tested it out days after and it is the same result. I wanted to learn more about her behavior that she had when sharpening her claws while I kept playing a minor 2nd. I didn’t know music therapy existed at the time until the end of my freshmen year of college. I researched music therapy and started to shadow a music therapist which lead me to want to try doing music therapy for animals since there were no articles on it at the time.

This project benefitted others because music therapy is a growing profession. There isn’t much research on music therapy for animals. I am hoping that this will benefit music therapists of the future who want to do music therapy about what they could do and learn from my mistakes to make music therapy for animals more effective. I know this will benefit the animals in some way too since people also don’t realize that their pet’s ears might be hurting from the volume or might act differently depending on the genre. When a pet is in their dying moments, Mozart might help calm them down rather than having them feel anxious when they are in the vet’s office knowing they are going to get the needle.

My project benefitted me because it made me learn a lot. It taught me that some concepts or methods I tried on the animals could be applied to my future music therapy human clients since I want to be a music therapist someday. This project benefitted me because even when I’m dealing with a really “bratty” client, I could still take with what I observed on the brattiest animal in the research I dealt with and apply it to how to deal with that client. There are going to be times that I’m going to feel frustrated or even sad; but, dealing with all the animals in my research project helped exposed me to some challenges present in music therapy. I personally want to keep expanding music therapy for animals while doing music therapy for human clients as I am hoping that far more results for music therapy on animals and humans will come.

 

 

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“I think you put him [Connor] in a coma with Taylor Swift”

-Betty who is the owner of the dog.

“She [Mercedes] is cranky because I woke her up from her nap”

-Rebecca Kelly who is the researcher of the project while testing the Argentina Tegu.