Community Site for Music Therapists Based on the Session Records of Music Therapy

This paper describes the design of a community site especially for music therapists. This site is made to achieve win-win relationship between music therapists and music information processing researchers. The clients of the music therapists have a lot of kinds of difficult conditions and backgrounds. Thus, the therapists need to exchange clinical information each other and to learn continuously about patients. They need a tool that can support storing, retrieving, and exchangeing therapeutic information. On the other hand, music information processing researchers, such as the first author is, have to collect data from real field where music is utilized to find new research topic and continuously contribute the human society with the new technologies. Thus, as a way of exchanging and storing information and also a way that is benefit able for both music therapists and music information processing researchers, we are designing a music therapists´ community site that can mainly support making daily records of their sessions. Input information is stored in the database inside the site. The information is expected to be used for the information retrieval for music therapists and also is expected to be important resources to find new research topics for music information processing researchers. In this paper, we describe the community site especially for music therapists that is designed and developed according to the interviews of music therapists.