Today’s blogpost is coming to you from beautiful (and cold!) Fort Collins, CO where I am completing advanced training in Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT). The training has been amazing thus far and I look forward to sharing some highlights with you next week. For now, I would like to share an app I discovered after our breakout session with Dr. Blythe LaGasse yesterday. Without going into too much detail, many of the NMT techniques we are learning about utilize a metronome. Since I didn’t have mine with me, I needed an alternative option, and quick! Enter the iPad. =) After browsing customer reviews, developer websites and the trusty itunes app store, I found a stellar metronome that is easy to use and that I would highly recommend for NMT’s, music therapists and music educators.
Tempo Advance
Cost: $1.99
Read the Review: iTunes Review
Description: Perfect for iPhone, iTouch or iPad, Tempo advance offers you so many features it’s insane. Aside from your typical digital metronome features like subdivision of beats, accentuation, count-ins, range of tempos, and volume controls for beats, this app offers unique features like tapping in the beat, 9 different sounds for the beat AND a record option to assign any sound you want to the beat, presets to store up to 5 rhythm patterns, and my favorite feature, setlists, which allow you to pull songs/tracks you have already created in iTunes into the app (pardon the run-on sentence). Like I said, an insane amount of features and oodles of beat goodness. =) Want to see it in action? Check out the developer’s video overview below.
Applications for Music Therapy: The applications for this app in music therapy are numerous, so I’ll focus on a few NMT applications. The tap in feature of this app could help to assess client’s baseline for gait with techniques like Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation (RAS) or Patterned Sensory Enhancement (PSE). The record option for assigning sounds to beats could be particularly helpful when working with clients on the Autism Spectrum with sensory needs.
Video overview from Frozen Ape:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h0LZ_3bUNM&feature=related[/youtube]
So how about you. Do you use a metronome in your music therapy sessions, music lessons or NMT sessions? Have you ever tried using an app as a metronome?