"Another lady came to us in the middle of the summer. So her behaviours can cause her great upset and she becomes very agitated and upset. She would come and sit and weep and weep. Part of her diagnosis means that her verbal communication is very, very compromised. And most of what she says. Is nonsensical, even though it makes sense to her, what she actually produces doesn't make sense to us. Recently we've been working with her on managing her. She and I were sharing in some music, we got to the end of a song and she took a great big sigh and went, Oh. And then she looked up, made eye contact with me and smiled. And this is unusual for her because she finds it very difficult to make eye contact with people. And so we had a little conversation about how sometimes it feels much better when you've had a big sigh and she went, yes. Yes. So then a couple of weeks ago, she came into a session and she was crying and we got to a point where I was able to get her to look at me and we started to take in a slow breath and out a slow breath. You know, much as any of us would, if we were anxious, you would just take it in a deep breath and gradually let it out. And we managed to do that a few times and she said, that's better. We've started doing this every session and regularly punctuating throughout her session, taking in a sigh and letting a sigh out and feeling better in inverted commas. And I've been able to then feed that back to the care home staff that if they can see she's becoming agitated then to do this breathing, which he acknowledges helps her, then we may be able to stop an agitated period before it begins."

"I have one client in particular, who I worked with for many years. And he is blind. He is deaf. He is in a wheelchair. When I was working with him pre pandemic, he could move his hands and his arms and his head. And that was about all. I've been doing online sessions with him weekly almost for a few months now. And he is now able to move his leg. He is kicking. He had a lot of different changes. He's had medication changes in all sorts. This isn't by any means or down to music therapy, but he is aware that I am in the room with him. And he's looking for me in his way. He's trying to figure out where I am because he can hear the vibration of my voice coming through the speaker that they are using. His development has just gone up and up and up more so in the pandemic actually than beforehand."

"So I was working with a client before the lockdown. This child is in care. And they were referred to music therapy for a lot of anxiety problems. They found it very hard to speak, but they were very drawn to music. They had a musical, they were very musical actually, you know, they had like a music talent and things like that. When they first started to attend with me, they came with their carer in the session. Because it was too anxiety provoking to come on their own. In those sessions before the lockdown, I would encourage wind instruments because it's a nice way to try to communicate using your mouth and using sounds like that without the need to speak. And I introduced a lot of humour in those sessions. We did a lot of little funny games and little funny improvs that they really liked and that kind of really relaxed the client and help them engage rather than feeling anxious and held back. Right before the lockdown, the client was just starting to come to the sessions on their own and they were speaking a lot to me, and unfortunately during the lockdown we weren't able to meet. Luckily I was able to get a new contract when we opened up again. I was a bit worried. I hadn't seen the client for about eight months. And I was afraid that they might have gone back into themselves a little bit and had anxiety. But it was quite successful in that they were very happy to see me and they were still very chatty. We were doing a mix of music and talking, and actually sometimes now we just do talking. And we might say, Oh, I forgot to even play something today. That even after an eight month break, they were able to come back. They felt comfortable enough. They felt like they had enough trust that they were able to just settle back in very quickly and open up to me again. And it also shows you the long-term positive effects of music therapy for mental health."

"One gentleman that lives in the community on his own, very elderly. And he used to attend one of our community sessions called silver singers every week without fail. He was there. And as soon as obviously lockdown happened, he was somebody who really suffered from that lack of intervention. So he was part of a population who is completely cut off from this virtual world. And so our community music practitioner sort of just quickly drew loads of resources together and recorded some CDs, made like a paper booklet for him, a pamphlet of activities and posted that off to him so that he could kind of have that connection to her. And then also alongside that she then reverted to every week calling him up on the telephone. And then they just sang together. And it was the most beautiful thing to see a recording of that. I witnessed it a couple of months ago and he is so incredibly grateful and he's so enigmatic about that contact that he has with that practitioner and that professional. It really does seem like a lifeline to him."

"This is someone who I started working with just before the lockdown and only had a couple of sessions with them. And then we managed to carry on through the lockdown. So originally the face-to-face sessions were mainly based around song singing and then verbal reflections based on the songs that were chosen, and what the lyrics meant to the person. During the lockdown, the sessions became much more about kind of talking and not much about practical music making, but we continued listening to songs together on YouTube and talking about the meaning of the lyrics. So in that case, it felt like the therapeutic relationship has probably developed more quickly and more deeply than it would have done otherwise because of the situation we're in, because the person is very isolated at home and has very few opportunities to explore their feelings, having that like one forum where they can just go in whatever direction they want has been really helpful for them. Especially with their health problems going up and down and stuff as well."

"Something very strange happened with this particular client. I'd been called by the mom of this client. And she asked me can you please continue the sessions? Should we try with zoom or something similar? And it's so strange because we tried for one week, 10 minutes every other day, and it simply didn't work. The client was very agitated. When in September I've been contacted again by the mother and she said, should we try now? So we started in zoom, so I sang the name of the client and just played a chord on the piano, and he smiled! He has autism and is totally blind since birth, and he smiled to me. I sang his name and since then we are having a weekly sessions and he's now engaged more than ever."

"So there's a young gentleman who I was working with. He had a lot of problems in terms of his emotional regulation. He came from quite a complex family background and a background in which home life was quite controlling. It was quite a difficult situation for this young man, because, because of how limited he was in what he was allowed to do, it meant that he had very little in common with his peers. And we worked a lot on just really building some kind of trusting relationship. Part of the, of the therapy process is that it's almost like you can kind of test things out with your therapist. So when things really challenge our relationship with your therapist, you can test that out with them. And then when it comes up in your sort of day-to-day life, you kind of know that you've got strategies that you can use, or you know, how you will deal with X, Y, and Z. He sent me something via his parents on an email that, in his own way said you know, no offense, but I don't talk about stuff, but I could with you and you made me feel safe and comfortable. You know, and by the end of the therapy, he was able to sit and we could play together for really long periods of time. We could talk about music. Or he could kind of really take ownership and just have that confidence to create like his own piece of music. That was such a huge, huge thing for him in terms of his own confidence."

"This young, this man, he's non-verbal and he has very little fine and gross motor movements because of his diagnosis. What's really interesting is to see him play the keyboard and in one session he will use like one finger, then he will keep these fingers closed and just use his wrist knuckles, and he will make like a cluster of notes. Then as the weeks passed you found him, try to use one finger more. So he will use one finger for the keyboard. And he will try to be more diatonic. Try to find something melodic and diatonic. And each week it improved where he started to use different fingers to create this sort of melodic contour. So this particular guy, after the first session, he said... I couldn't understand him, right, but his caregiver could. And he said his brain feels at ease."