Inside a music therapy session

“Each one of you gets to have your own personal thunderstorm,” Judith Pinkerton explains as she brandishes a cylindrical spring drum, demonstrating, how it’s used to generate the sound of a thunderclap.

“We’re going to create a soundscape,” she tells the six men seated around her during a Tuesday night music therapy session at Solutions Recovery.

The theme is the sound of the ocean during a storm.

Everyone has been given a drum and instructed not to talk once the playing begins.

First comes the sound of waves from a sand-filled ocean drum.

The men rub their hands in a circular motion on the face of their instruments to approximate the wind. The pitter-patter of fingers on drums suggests falling rain.

Before long, everyone falls in rhythm, some playing with eyes closed. Each man gets a turn at the thunder drum before a metallic Hapi drum is passed, its soothing chime ends the session.

“Sometimes, tones like this can help you switch a thought,” Pinkerton explains, “because we’re going through this, bringing up thunderstorms, storms in our lives, and then being able to go, ‘You know what? It’s not so bad,’ focusing on how you can switch that out.”

This is the other half of what Pinkerton does: along with working one-on-one with patients and examining personal music habits, she leads group sessions to bring people together while creating music, giving them a feeling of belonging as they work through one of the hardest times of their lives.

“So what was it like for you?” Pinkerton asks the group.

“It was a release of the negative energy with the positive coming in,” says John Pickard, a blond, bespectacled man in a tie-dye Pink Floyd T-shirt who describes himself as an addict of 40 years.

This is the point of the session, to work through feelings that are sometimes beyond words.

John Pickard plays a Hapi drum during a music therapy session.