The markers of interplay between the music therapist and the high risk full term infant.

The purpose of this research was to discover the markers of interplay between the music therapist and the medically fragile newborn infant. Video footage of 3 infants was selected to exemplify 3 significant events in the therapeutic process. Four expert reviewers viewed the footage and completed a video-cued discussion with the therapist/ researcher. Reviews and discussions were collated with the therapist-researcher's post-session notes to create rich descriptions from which the articulated and inferred behaviors of both therapist and infant were thematically analyzed. The outcome was 14 sets of behaviors used by the medically fragile newborn infants to indicate availability for interplay and 20 sets of behaviors the therapist used in response to the infants. The interaction between these behaviors provided 7 markers of interplay between the music therapist and the medically fragile newborn infant.