Vol 6(1), March 1, 2006
mi40006000198

New Face(s)

By Carolyn Kenny |Author bio & contact info| & Brynjulf Stige |Author bio & contact info|

The New Look of Voices

We are proud to present this issue, Volume 6(1), with the new look that has been designed for the Voices Forum. Torgeir Stige, a young art student, has volunteered to produce a visual design that we think will suit the purpose and the function of Voices, and we appreciate the time-consuming effort that has been made by him and our Managing Editor Rune Rolvsjord in preparing the new look of Voices. We feel that the Forum now has a visual design and a structure that is convenient for daily use and navigation among texts, images, and audio-visual files. Our ambition is that navigation in Voices should be more than just practical course-plotting; it should be a "journey" in itself, offering aesthetic experiences.

A new face has been established for Voices, then. Whether or not this change will be accompanied by a new phase of development depends upon the contributions of editors and authors around the world. We will introduce you to some of the new faces that have volunteered to contribute as editors and we will also share with you aspects of the continuous process of developing our Guidelines for contributors.

New Editors for Voices

Because Voices has grown so rapidly over the last year, we decided to gradually increase our Editorial Staffing. We will eventually have Co-editors for every region and section of Voices. This is working out beautifully, so far. Two editors share the responsibilities, increase the possibilities of professional networks around the world, and in many cases, bringing in some of the younger generation of leaders in Music Therapy from around the world.

This month, we introduce several new editors to our Voices staff.

We are happy to welcome Hyun Ju Chung, a Music Therapist from Korea, who has agreed to serve as Co-editor for Asia, joining Rika Ikuno from Japan, who has been working on Voices since our beginning five years ago. Ju is an Associate Professor at Ewa University for women in Korea. She also serves as the Program Director for the Music Therapy Clinic at the University. Ju encourages Music Therapy students to identify with one of the Music Therapy clinical approaches such as Nordoff/Robbins or GIM so that they can develop an in-depth expertise in practice. Describing her work, Ju writes: 

It is important for the students to learn how to utilize the music and its resource. Students should gain knowledge and insight in terms of how music can be used differently, instead of what music it is, whether Korean or Western. Of course it is important to develop "our" own, culture-sensitive, musical resource. However, understanding the flexible application of the resources is also an important part of training (Chung, 2005).

We are also happy to welcome Guylaine Vaillancourt from Canada, who will join Michele Forinash as Co-editor for North America. Guylaine is a French Canadian Music Therapist from Québec. Her first career was in Nursing and she still works as a nurse in Palliative Care, driving across the border into New York to work several times each week and spending several days a week also working as a Music Therapist in Québec. She received her Music Therapy training and education at the Université de Québec à  Montréal (UQAM) in 1988 and throughout these years has become an outstanding leader in the Music Therapy community in Canada, now serving as the President of the Association de Musicothérapie à  Québec. She is also currently a student in the Antioch University Ph.D. in Leadership and Change in the Professions. Guylaine is committed to building bridges between the French-speaking communities around the world and is working diligently alongside Music Therapists in France and Martinique to establish Music Therapy education and training in Martinique (see Voices: Country of Month, February 2005 ). She has also traveled extensively in Africa and is truly a global citizen dedicated to music and healing in its many forms.

Finally, we are pleased to welcome Tor Olav Heldal, who has agreed to serve as Monitoring Editor of the Unmoderated Discussions. Tor Olav is a Norwegian Music Therapist, working in a psychiatric clinic in a rural area of Western Norway and currently also a masters student in music therapy. You may wonder why we need an editor for unmoderated discussions? Tor Olav has defined his task in the following way:

Since the discussions are 'unmoderated,' my influence will be restricted to: promoting and giving advice to contributors as to the proper use of the forum, and deleting contributions that are clearly inappropriate in nature or in lack of relevance for music therapy in general.

The unmoderated discussion forum will be screened and monitored once a week and we are happy that we now can offer the service of monitoring it. While this part of the forum still is extremely open and the content of unmoderated discussions is the complete responsibility of the writer, we feel that the monitoring role that Tor Olav has taken will ensure that the section remains a safe and suitable space for exploration of questions of relevance for music therapy and its international development.

In addition to introducing these three new editors, we want to express appreciation of the continuous contribution of our Managing Editor, Rune Rolvsjord. He has been part of the Voices project since the very beginning and is certainly not a new member of the team, but as the Forum has been changing and growing his responsibilities have too. He has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to initiate and support the processes and procedures that the Forum has needed.

Guidelines for Contributors

Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy has a primary goal of encouraging dialogue that cuts across continent, nation, class, method, technique, and discipline, with Music Therapy and traditional healing practices that use music as the center of our dialogue. Our identity is "forum" – a place for the sharing of ideas, the announcing of new initiatives, and the expressing of viewpoints through discussion and dialogue. Though our work is based a great deal on practice, we are also interested in the conversations about scholarship in our field. Yet we want to keep the nature of our dialogue open.

After many discussions with our editors about the issue of "criteria" for publication, we have decided to take the middle road on criteria. We value the openness of our dialogue. Therefore, our review process will remain informal. However, we do want to offer a few new guidelines for both contributors and editors. We will present some of our ideas on this development here, and gradually revise the Guidelines accordingly in the weeks and months to come.

If you want to contribute a text to Voices or participate in one of our many discussions, please review the "Guidelines" section of our forum. In general, we offer the following guidelines for contributors:

• We want texts that encourage dialogue
• We would like you to offer a text with "clarity of voice"
• Please situate your text in an academic discipline, a culture, or a social context
• Choose a narrative style that is integral with one of our genres, which you can review in our Guidelines section
• We particularly encourage writers who offer something that is unique to their country, nation, or region
• Please "position" yourself as a writer by describing why you have chosen your style of exposition.

In the Guidelines for contributors, you will find seven choices for genres: theoretical papers, essays, stories, clinical papers, reports, interviews, and international archives. Please choose the genre that feels right to you. As you will see, we understand that very often, there is a mix. But we would like you to consider these seven genres because we want to publish texts in each one and also texts that mix genres. We also offer guidelines for our Voices publication style in the Guidelines. These are meant to help you when you write. But we have a lot of help for English as a second language. So this kind of technical editing can help you to make your text into a published article.

We would like you to consider publishing in your own language if English is not your native language. So far, we have published bilingual versions such as English/Spanish, Japanese/English, French/English. We are very happy when texts can be published in two languages. Access is important for Voices, and we do want to help create bridges between languages and cultures.

References

Chung, Hyun Ju (2005). Some Considerations for Further Development of Music Therapy in Korea. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved February 21, 2006, from http://www.voices.no/mainissues/mi40005000181.html