Musical Connections

This research team is part of the Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy at NYU, an active music therapy clinic that also conducts research on the creative and developmental processes of music therapy. The Music and Social Connection team will focus on analyzing data from a recent study evaluating responses of autistic children and young adults over the course of 15 weeks of music therapy. Music engagement will be measured with the Music Engagement Scale (MES), which is scored after observation of video-recorded sessions. Social synchronization will be evaluated using data from wrist-worn sensors, including accelerometry and photoplethysmography (PPG), to evaluate social synchronization. Team members will have the opportunity to engage in several areas of research, based on their interests. This may include: (1) training in use of the MES to support reliable rating of music engagement (2) applied use of the MES to rate music engagement after observation of video-recorded sessions (2) signal processing (3) time series similarity analyses (4) statistical computing, including correlation and regression (5) academic writing for publishing research results.