Emotionally Intelligent Music
Training Topics
Find the training you want
Get the training you need
Applied Music Psychology is the most powerful, least-leveraged tool that we have.
Since 1997, psychologists and musicians have been acquired a flood of incredible new information about the musical brain.
It’s time to bridge the gap between the lab and the classroom.
In these trainings, your students can learn the profoundly practical knowledge about the brain that will be useful in their whole life -
On their first day teaching, through to their last day of teaching.
Every day of their performance career
With every professional interaction.
Get a preview! Watch a full session here.
“Creating Mental Health Through Music,” presented at the NAfME Northwest Conference 2023
Get a preview! Listen to a full session here.
“Advocacy That Works,” presented at the Virginia NAfME Conference 2024
Topics for Training
These sessions are very flexible, and can be used in a variety of contexts!
You’re Invited to Paradigm-Shifting Training Sessions
Making Musicians offers music teachers research-backed SEL tools focused on Emotional Intelligence to enhance music education. It provides innovative methods tailored to educators’ and students’ needs.
Learning about the musical brain equips you with the best tools for teaching music.
Give those tools to your community, your students - and yourself.
Music and the Brain Basics
-
How does the brain interact with music?
The truth is, music lives at the center of the brain - in the same area where our deepest emotions live. This has TREMENDOUS implications for music making, music learning, and music listening.
In this session, we will cover:
The Brain as a Car: How to visualize the musical brain (and achieve brain balance).
Teaching the Forebrain: Best practices for teaching the thinking brain.
Training the Hindbrain: Best practices for teaching the moving brain.
Optimizing the Midbrain: Best practices for training the feeling brain.
This session is comprehensive and can be broken down into smaller chunks for specific contexts.
-
Is there a simple way to think about the brain, that will meaningfully improve your musical life? YES!
Being a musician who knows how the musical brain works is like being a mechanic who knows how a car engine works - everything starts to make more sense.
In this session, we discuss how the different functions of the musical brain can improve your practice, your performance, and your teaching.
-
If the brain is like a car, the forebrain is like the trunk - the place where you pack everything you need for your journey. What does it take to make sure that a musician is well packed for their musical life?
In this session, you will learn how to gain musical knowledge faster, how to deploy it more easily, and how to teach it most effectively.
-
What would it mean for a musician to master movement?
In this session, you will learn the most efficient way to learn movement. We will answer the questions:
What works when you have to learn to move?
What doesn’t work?
How do you create efficiency that is powered by joy?
How do you practice in a way that connects your movements to your deepest musicality?
The Musical Brain and Teaching
-
What do principals, school board members, and superintendents want most? What do parents and community members think the purpose of music is?
The truth is, we have more compelling and more profound proof that music is the basis of human thriving than we every had. Using the discoveries in Applied Music Psychology since the 1990s, we will go over proven methods for increasing budgets, engaging your community, and creating real change.
Session Objectives
Understand the basics of brain structure in relation to music production.
Discover the implications of brain mechanics for practicing, teaching, and performing.
Review the strongest new arguments from Applied Music Psychology
Brainstorm common ways to create advocacy opportunities
-
If the brain is like a car, then you need to know how to drive one well!
In this session, we will engage with what it means to optimize the curriculums and repertoire that you teach for your students’ brains.
-
Music is a joy - practicing should be too!
The truth is, joy is a source of strength. There are many ways to motivate a student to play and practice their instrument, but joy is the most effective and the most enduring.
In this session, we will work through
The roadblocks between a music learner and joy,
Dive deep into the practice map, and
Learn techniques for returning students to a state of joy during hard work.
-
What would it be like if your music classroom was full of kids who really knew how to practice?
In this session, we will work through new discoveries in applied music psychology which show us how we can help our students:
Confidently work through the four stages of competence and into sublimity,
Never again get discouraged, bored, or even frustrated with their practice,
Use the scaffolding skills they learn in their music classes in other classes and other activities - because music makes the best kind of people!
Session Objectives
Understand the basics of brain structure in relation to skill acquisition in music.
Discover the implications of brain mechanics for practice, and how to communicate and embed that knowledge into students,
Create a structure for how to do this work in each attendee’s individual context.
By understanding more about how diverse brains work, we empower teachers to include more students in musical work than otherwise could before.
-
Enough is enough!
For too long, musicians and music teachers have glorified the kind of endless (and inefficient) work patterns that can only end in burn-out. The truth is, burn-out doesn’t help ANYONE. Not you, and definitely not your students.
In this session, you will learn
Brain mechanics made easy for busy working teachers,
How an emotionally regulated music teacher can uniquely strengthen the emotional and mental health of students, and
What self-care practices are most effective for self-regulation.
-
The study of Applied Music Psychology has unearthed an uncomfortable truth:
We’ve all been learning how to read music, wrong.
it turns out, there is a significantly more brain-efficient way for students to learn to read music. It is easier for the brain (taught correctly) to read music than for the brain to read language.
In this session, we will go over
The best way to teach music reading (starting at age 2!)
How to create neural pathways that make sight reading (the physical performance of written music) a breeze
The ways that bad music reading can be remediated and transformed into better brain-efficient methods.
-
Did you know that the same area of the brain that processes music is also the area where we feel our biggest emotions? That means as a music teacher, you ARE dealing with your students emotions, every day - you don’t have a choice!
In this session, we will work through tools which you can use to deal with emotions - yours and your students’ - in a healthy and productive way that creates happier classrooms, more dedicated practicers, and overall better music
Session Objectives
Understand the basics of brain structure in relation to music production.
Discover the implications of brain mechanics for practicing, teaching, and performing.
Go through the common emotional responses to learning music, and review the most effective ways to interface with those emotions.
The Musical Brain and Performance
-
Great news! It turns out, stage fright isn’t just treatable; it’s curable.
In the last 25 years, the field of Applied Music Psychology has unearthed some incredible truths about the way that music exists in the brain. These golden nuggets have given music performers brand new ways to help ourselves thrive in music classrooms, practice rooms - and even on stage.
In this session, you will learn techniques which you can use to overcome your performance nerves not just once, but forever.
-
How do you connect your deepest emotions to your performances (and see past the technique)?
There is a way to unearth natural musicality by connecting the sounds of the music with the deep emotions of the performer. This goes beyond technique, and reaches into the heart and purpose of music.
In this session, we dive in to what it means to feel music, how to connect story and context to a performance, and how you’ve really be exploring emotions in music since the day you were born.
-
It’s common wisdom now that mastery requires 10,000 hours of practice. If that’s true, how can someone ever master performance?
It’s possible - right in your own practice room!
Since the 1990s, Applied Music Psychology has been discovering the mental states and processes of performance. And it turns out that we can replicate that during our practice!
In this session, we will discover
The common brain activity experienced by music performers,
How to replicate that brain activity in the practice room, and
How to make yourself mistake-proof on stage.
Sessions for your Community
-
No one alive today has taught music to students who have experienced as much trauma as our students have. Wars, illness, political upheaval, and stress have become ubiquitous. And because music lives in the same part of the brain where emotions are created, music teachers in particular must be equipped with more tools to help distressed students.
The truth is, music and music making has the capacity to provide great mental and emotional help. And, it doesn’t have to be done in a music therapy office! It can be done in your music classroom, your music studio, or your home.
In this session, you will be introduced to the basics of the brain, how this new science changes the way that we should approach our relationship with music, and learn to apply this new science to every way that you engage with music.
-
What if I told you that you could get more engagement, more focus, and better retention from your students with one tool in a five-minute break?
Well you can - and it’s music.
This practical music training gives you the power to reengage your students with the powerfully motivating force of JOY. Proven in classrooms around the world, this training goes beyond listening to music to actually engaging with music literacy.
In this session, we will
Learn the simple curriculum that can be taught and practiced in five minute increments, that even the least musical teacher can use.
Find out how to use this curriculum strategically throughout lessons and the school day to reengage students with Joy, and
How this active music training can wildly improve your students literacy and math comprehension, and
How to use passive music to wildly improve study and reading times.
-
Applied music psychology is a very young field. When Paul Farnsworth published the first book on the social psychology of music in 1954, he probably didn’t imagine it would take until 1997 for this discipline to be truly established as a legitimate line of research. There is a world of new information that simply wasn’t available even 25 years ago, and what we’ve found out in those years is nothing short of revolutionary.
In this session, you’ll learn to bring this incredible new wealth of knowledge to the music classroom, in a way that is easily accessible to busy music teachers. You will be introduced to the basics of the brain, what you need to know to improve your teaching, and how to use your new understanding to create wildly improved student retention and even student obsession.
Session Objectives
Understand the basics of brain structure in relation to music production.
Discover the implications of brain mechanics for practicing, teaching, and performing.
Learn to apply this knowledge to curriculum to produce the most brain-efficient lesson plans
Learning about the brain helps teachers connect not only better with their students, but with themselves
-
In a challenging economy, private teachers often feel the pinch.
In this session, we will engage with the proven methods from Applied Music Psychology that will not only attract more students, but keep them with you no matter what the economy is doing.
We will cover -
How to communicate your value to parents and guardians (so they never want to let you go),
How to deliver that value to students in a way that gives you social proof (and makes students obsessed with their lessons),
How to market to new students (including what works and what doesn’t), and
All the practical issues that go with running a private studio.
-
There is a map for learning. When students of any subject learn this map, they have the tool that they need to be able to get good at anything.
In this session, we will go over the Four Competencies - a tool regularly used by Fortune 500 companies and high-level professionals the world over. Simplified and attached to Applied Psychology, you will learn:
How to effectively communicate the learning process to students,
How to teach students to make the learning process their own,
How to help students practice the Four Stages of Competency in their chosen field of study, and
How to measure whether your students’ progress on the learning map.
Make Residency or Live Training a reality
Who is this for for?
We love to work with Colleges and Universities who want make a difference! Live Trainings and Residencies are ideal for:
Performance Studios (during lessons or classes)
Music Education Students
Music teachers and music students in the community,
Group rehearsals,
Professional Development for faculty and staff.
What can we do during a Live Training?
Live trainings are all about you. Take a look through our content offerings, or fill out the form to the left and let us help guide you through what will work best for your context.
Live trainings can look like:
One-Day Masterclasses or Professional Development seminars,
Zoom trainings (the most affordable options)
Weekly online short-
What could we do during a Residency?
Residencies give you a great opportunity to bring value to your current students, engage your local community, and recruit new students to your program. During your Residency time, you can:
Give all your students super-practical tools with The Music-Learning Brain Seminar.
Give your performance students a deeper connection with their music and a boost in the practice room by presenting an EIMI Seminar for your Performance Studios.
See how EIMI works in large- or small-group contexts by having an EIMI Rehearsal of your ensembles.
Bring value to your community (and attract new students!) by hosting a Music and Your Brain event for local music teachers and students.
How do I make this happen?
Residencies are very customizable by price, length, and location. To find out more about how to schedule a Residency at YOUR college or University, fill out the form below and you will hear from someone within 48 hours: