Towards Computational Music Analysis for Music Therapy

The research field of music therapy has witnessed a rising interest in recent years to develop and employ computational methods to support therapists in their daily practice. While Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research has identified the area of health and well-being as a promising application field for MIR methods to support health professionals, collaborations with experts in this field are as of today sparse. This paper provides an overview of potential applications of computational music analysis as developed in MIR for the field of active music therapy. We elaborate on the music therapy method of improvisation, with a particular focus on introducing therapeutic concepts that relate to musical structures. We identify application scenarios for analysing musical structures in improvisations, introduce existing analysis methods of therapists, and discuss the potential of MIR methods to support these analyses. Upon identifying a current gap between high-level concepts of therapists and low-level features from existing computational methods, the paper concludes further steps towards developing computational approaches to music analysis for music therapy in an interdisciplinary collaboration.