Overview
Focus and attention issues create problems for hundreds of thousands of children, often leading to academic, social, and behavioral problems. The Focused Attention Music Program is designed to teach your child to focus and pay attention.
This audio program contains musical melodies set against a backdrop of various sounds and noises so that the listener learns to pay attention to the primary input (in this case, the music) and to filter out the extraneous sounds. This skill is called auditory figure-ground processing. The program is organized with a progression of difficulty, so that it starts out easier and moves through progressively harder levels.
Decreasing distractibility and improving attention can have a direct impact on a child’s ability to listen and succeed in the classroom. The Focused Attention program:
- Can improve a child’s school performance
- Is designed to help with distractibility
- Is designed to assist children and adults in attending better and focusing longer
- Is easy to use
- Takes only a few minutes a day
- Can improve your own job performance and social skills
- Is completely compatible with other sound therapy programs
- Was found to be beneficial for adults who had problems listening in noise due to aging
Because the program uses interactive listening, a listening partner is required. The listening partner is typically a parent, but it could be a teacher, therapist, or other caregiver or facilitator as well.
Full Description
The TSI: Focused Attention music program is a TSI-Targeted Sound Intervention™ training program aimed at a very specific aspect of auditory processing—auditory figure-ground processing. That is the ability to attend to and process an auditory input when there are competing background sounds. The six CDs of the program are intended to lay a foundation for figure-ground processing, i.e, train auditory attention to a particular stimulus in the presence of competing sounds. This 18-week program that gets progressively more difficult requires only two 3-6 minute fun, interactive sessions per day. The basic set contains 6 CDs, written instructions for use, 18-week listening schedule, and a 40-minute instructional DVD.
From young children with developmental disabilities to high-functioning adults with attention problems, TSI: Focused Attention can change how you are able to tune-in and focus. Participants in our original field test showed improvement in the ability to interpret speech in noise after using the program. NACD clients show functional improvements in their ability to tune in to auditory stimuli and stay focused when random distractions are present.
We have carefully and intentionally used original musical compositions as our auditory targets, rather than language-based stimuli. This allows us to keep the focus on developing the attention aspect of figure-ground processing, setting a foundation for then going on to address language processing in noise. Our initial field test for TSI: Focused Attention showed that children’s ability to hear/process speech in noise improved with the use of the program. We chose to use original compositions rather than existing music because it requires more effort and attention on the part of the listener. One cannot pull from experience and anticipate what comes next in the music; therefore intensity and attention are increased. Also, by using original compositions we could tailor the musical content specifically to the purpose and intention of the program.
This program specifically addresses auditory attention in the presence of competing sounds. It does not directly address tonal processing or sequential processing. However, as auditory attention and figure-ground listening improve, certainly they will have a positive impact on these other areas of processing.
Why use TSI: Focused Attention? Because we never listen in isolation, our ability to attend and listen when background sound is present is applicable every day of our lives. It affects children in classrooms, adults at work, families at home, friends socializing in a restaurant. When we refer to hearing in the presence of “noise,” this can include anything from loud, intrusive sounds to soft background sounds. Noise may be the distant sound of a jet at 30,000 feet or a fire alarm in the school hallway. Noise is not always defined by volume or frequency. Sometimes it is simply the presence of a sound that gets your attention and distracts you from what you had intended to listen to. We are discovering that this is virtually a universal problem. In particular, it is quite a significant problem for individuals who have any hypersensitivity to sound.
So, why use TSI: Focused Attention? Use it because it can have a huge impact on your life.
Click here to read more about Focused Attention
Click here to read about FA2, the next step