NYU Steinhardt’s Nordoff-Robbins Center and MARL Receive Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Award

Two research centers at NYU Steinhardt—the Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy and Music and Audio Research Laboratory (MARL)—were recently awarded the Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Award. The award supports a collaborative study that uses wearable technology to investigate how music therapy may improve social motor synchrony (SMS) and social communication in autistic individuals.

Autistic individuals often show reduced SMS—the alignment of body movements during interaction—which contributes to challenges in social communication. This study investigates whether the Nordoff-Robbins approach to music therapy may improve both SMS and communication in autistic children. 

Over the course of a 15-week intervention, 10 children and their therapists will both wear accelerometry devices embedded with a software developed by Lauren Fink at McMaster University to continuously measure synchronization in body movement and heart rate during weekly therapy sessions. Social communication will be measured before and after each session using the Autism Impact Measure. 

“We hypothesize that increased SMS over time will correlate with improved communication skills,” says Alan Turry, assistant professor and director of Music Therapy at Steinhardt, as well as the principal investigator on key research projects at Nordoff-Robbins. “By identifying a mechanistic relationship between SMS and social outcomes, this project will inform scalable, evidence-based music interventions, and will build a foundation for broader access to effective, personalized autism interventions.”

With a commitment to the belief that everyone possesses a sensitivity to music that can be utilized for personal growth and development, the Nordoff-Robbins Center provides music therapy to people of all ages, from self-referred adults to young children with disabilities. 

“The Nordoff-Robbins approach to music therapy is based on moment-to-moment musical interactions that rely on the creativity of the therapist to bring out each client’s potential,” says Turry. “Using improvisation skills in a compositional form, music therapists sense the mood, gestures, energy, and nonverbal cues from their client and create music that is coming from the person—the client is the score of the music, and it helps them take a step in their development or express repressed emotions through their participation in the session.”

MARL, which is an interdisciplinary center at the intersection of science, technology, music, and sound, is helping to figure out the best approaches to assess synchrony between client and practitioner during sessions.

“Lucky for us, there are many people out there who have thought about ways to analyze interpersonal synchrony, so some existing tools are already available to us,” says Anna Palumbo (PhD ’25, Rehabilitation Sciences; MA ’12, Music Therapy), a Nordoff-Robbins therapist and researcher. “I’m working alongside Pablo Ripollés [assistant professor of Music Technology and Psychology and associate director of MARL] to assess these tools—starting with an open source package on GitHub—to see how they work with our data before deciding if and how they may need to be adapted.”

Relatedly, Nordoff-Robbins received a MARL Seed Award to fund research on how AI can be used to analyze music therapy videos in collaboration with Magdalena Fuentes, assistant professor of Music Technology and Integrated Design and Media.

“With this funding, we’re starting to see what is possible to analyze with existing tools, given the challenges of applying them in a clinical setting,” says Palumbo. “We’re excited about the possibility that we could assess SMS using AI, rather than smartwatches, as some clients have a hard time wearing watches due to sensory issues.” 

In January, Turry, Fink, Palumbo, and Ripollés met with Fleming to discuss their research. Watch the team’s video here.

“There are wonderful developments happening in music therapy, and it’s great to see it come more into the mainstream,” says Turry.  “A lot of people look at the goal of music therapy as regaining a major life function such as walking or talking; some outcomes are less dramatic but no less important. This includes supporting a person’s sense of self in connection with others, alongside their physical and cognitive development. Having a musical, emotional, and sensory connection to another person can be profoundly powerful, and our goal is for the outcomes of music therapy to meaningfully impact a person’s life beyond the session.”

The Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Awards support innovative and collaborative research by early career researchers, designed to expand the evidence base of the emerging field of neuroarts. Learn more about all the 2025 awardees.