Week 0: Introduction How Effective is Music Therapy?

Introduction:

 

Hello everyone! My name is Tyler Lucas Cheung and I am a senior at BASIS Independent Brooklyn. I’ve been a BASIS student for about seven years now and joined when the school first open a Brooklyn location, so as a founding student I wanted to pursue the tradition of the Senior Project! I am excited to share my blog with you and share my interesting discoveries! I am an avid music producer and love to make music during my free time. I even have a producer tag “ProdSuey” on Youtube and post some of my beats on there! My hobbies include basketball, soccer, making music, and chess. I am fascinated by the fields of Business, Music Production, and Psychology all of which I will be pursuing further in college. 

 

My Senior Project:

 

Currently, there are 1 in 68 kids in the United States who have ASD and many don’t have access to music therapy resources to help with their needs. A close family friend of ours expressed this concern, and explained to me how critical it was to make sure to find a safe environment for their kid and how incredibly hard it was for them to find one. My interaction with my mom’s friend truly inspired me to dive deeper into the issues regarding accessibility of resources for children with autism and for me to also ask the question, “ how can we make music therapy more affordable and accessible.” 

 

I found these statistics to be horrifying and hard to accept that many families that have children with autism don’t even have enough money to put food on the table, and a roof for their family to live under. The average cost for music therapy sessions in New York is around $75 an hour, which majority of families can’t afford. My research will tackle this issue with affordability and accessibility for music therapy sessions. I’ll be surveying and interviewing existing organizations that have made music therapy affordable in their location, such as Grupo Salto, a music therapy organization located in Chicago, Illinois. 

 

In addition to my research on music therapy, I’ll be working with the Red Hook Art Project to provide free digital music production lessons for the community of Red Hook. As part of my Senior Project, I want to give back to the community and also evaluate which digital music platforms are the best for different age groups. I’ll be also working with Dr. Noa Fort, who is a music therapist, and learn from her expertise on how effective music therapy and the methods she uses during her sessions. I want to be able to gather and provide resources for families with children that have autism in Brooklyn through my research! 

Link to my Defense Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XHWRBuVfWVw6b7tX4lA5_fDh4lrGr8HWM5yMTj6COFI/edit#slide=id.p

Images Cited:

Ball, E. (2020, August 18). Almost one-third of autistic children in the United States live in poverty. Spectrum | Autism Research News. https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/more-than-half-of-autistic-children-in-united-states-live-in-poverty/

Thank you,

Tyler