Online Music and Art Therapy: What Changes When the Session Moves to a Screen

Yes, registered music and art therapists do offer sessions by video, and the title, the register and the standards behind them do not change with the medium; what changes is the work itself, most of all for music, where the delay on an ordinary call stops two people playing in time together. Online sessions are a legitimate way to have arts therapy. They are not the same session with a camera pointed at it, and knowing which parts move is what lets you judge whether it suits the person in question.

I wanted this page because I have now been asked some version of “can she just do it on a laptop” by three different families in the care homes where I run sessions, and because nowhere on this site answered it. Where a claim about effect appears below it carries a tier (Tier 1 supported, Tier 2 promising but limited, Tier 3 practice and anecdote), explained on reading arts in health research.

Is online arts therapy still therapy?

Yes, if the person delivering it is registered; the screen neither adds that nor takes it away.

In the UK four titles are protected in law: art psychotherapist, art therapist, dramatherapist and music therapist. Between them they accounted for 6,103 registrants on the HCPC register in July 2026¹, and anybody using one of those titles must be on the register whether they see people in a clinic, a school, a care home or a video call. The structure of the work is meant to travel with them: an assessment, written goals for a named person, notes, clinical supervision, a review partway through and a planned ending.

The reverse also holds. A singing group streamed online, a painting class on a video platform and a wellbeing session run by an artist are community activities, exactly as they would be in a church hall, and putting them on a screen does not make them therapy. The distinction this whole site turns on does not move because the room has.

What changes in a music therapy session over video

Shared live music changes most, because the delay on a video call makes playing in time together close to impossible.

In a room, a great deal of music therapy is improvised: the therapist and the client make music at the same moment, and the therapist responds to tempo, volume and silence as they happen. What happens in a music therapy session describes that hour. Over an ordinary video call the sound arrives late enough that two people trying to keep a shared beat drift apart within a few bars, and the software often suppresses one voice while the other is playing. So the work tends to reorganise itself around things the delay does not spoil: taking turns, one person playing while the other listens, singing along to a recording that both can hear, talking about music, and writing songs, where the words and the structure can be passed back and forth without anyone needing to land on the same beat.

It is worth being clear about what the site’s strongest result does and does not say here. Rhythmic auditory stimulation after stroke improved gait velocity by 11.34 m/min (95% CI 8.40 to 14.28) across 9 trials and 268 participants, moderate quality evidence, which is Tier 1². That is a finding about walking to an external beat. It is not evidence about video delivery, and it should not be borrowed to support an online service, however natural the leap looks.

What changes in an art therapy session over video

The picture stays in your house, and the therapist sees it through a camera rather than across a table.

That sounds small and is not. In a room the therapist can see scale, texture and colour as they are, and the artwork is usually kept safely by the therapist between sessions, which matters to people who would rather not have it on the kitchen table all week. Online, the person needs their own materials, a surface they can make a mess on, and somewhere to put the work afterwards where nobody else will pick it up. The therapist may ask to see a piece held up to the camera, or for a photograph of it.

Nor do the trials help much with the comparison. The largest UK trial of art therapy, MATISSE, delivered weekly groups of up to eight people for 90 minutes, in person, for 12 months, and found no difference between its three arms on either primary outcome³. Its design tells you what a properly resourced in person programme looked like; it says nothing either way about a laptop.

Privacy, safety and who else is in the house

The hardest part of online therapy is often the house rather than the therapy.

A clinic room is private by design. A front room is not, and a person who cannot be sure that a partner, a parent or a carer is out of earshot will say less and make less. Therapists working by video usually agree a few things at the start: where the person will be, whether anyone else is present, what happens if the connection drops in the middle of something difficult, and who to contact if they are worried about the person’s safety, which means knowing their address. Ask for all of that if nobody raises it.

Recording and photographs need the same care they need anywhere. A screenshot of a face or a photograph of a piece of work is personal data, and data protection law covers how it is stored and shared, regulated in the UK by the Information Commissioner’s Office⁴. Where the person may lack capacity, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 sets out five principles for how any decision on their behalf has to be approached⁵, and somebody who cannot consent to being recorded cannot agree to a recorded session. Consent and safeguarding in arts in health goes through what that means in practice, and every word of it applies on a screen.

Does online therapy work as well as in person?

Nobody can give an honest number for that from the evidence traced for this site.

The reviews this site relies on report results for music and arts interventions without a separate estimate for video delivery. The 2025 Cochrane review of music based therapeutic interventions in dementia, for example, pooled 30 studies and 1,720 participants randomised, and reports a small improvement in depressive symptoms, SMD -0.23 (95% CI -0.42 to -0.04) at moderate certainty (Tier 1), alongside moderate certainty evidence of no effect on agitation⁶. Nothing in this site’s source document breaks any of those figures down by whether the sessions happened in a room or on a call.

So a claim that online arts therapy is as effective as in person work is Tier 3 on this site, and specifically the not yet tested kind rather than the tested and found wanting kind. That is not a verdict that it does not work. It means a practitioner or a service that tells you the two are equivalent is going further than the evidence collected here, and a fair answer to “is it as good” is “for some people it is the only version they can reach, and for others something important gets lost”.

Online community groups and arts on prescription

Online community groups exist and are popular, and the evidence base that describes arts on prescription is almost entirely about rooms.

The 2024 systematic review of arts on prescription screened 7,805 records and included 25 studies, with no randomised controlled trials identified; most interventions ran 8 to 10 weeks, and the settings it lists are community venues, arts venues, GP surgeries, primary care and one school⁷. Any effect claim from that literature is Tier 3. An online scheme may be a good thing, but it is not what that review describes.

I tried a singing session over a video call once, for a resident whose daughter could not travel and wanted to join in. Within a verse we were half a line apart, and the only version that worked was me singing and her listening, with her mother beside me in the day room. It was lovely, and it was not what happens when the group sings together. That is roughly the honest summary of online community music as I have met it: a real thing worth having, and a different thing from the room.

Checking a practitioner and what it costs

The checks are the same as for in person work, with one extra question about which country’s register applies.

In the UK, search the HCPC register yourself for any of the four protected titles, and if the practitioner says they are a member of the British Association of Art Therapists or the British Association for Music Therapy, treat that as additional rather than a substitute⁸. In the United States the credential is MT-BC, and the Certification Board for Music Therapists recorded 10,699 holders as at 30 June 2026⁹, while most states do not license music therapists at all. A practitioner offering video sessions across a border should be able to tell you which register they are on and which rules they work under. How to find a music therapist sets out the routes country by country.

On price, this site holds no separate figure for online sessions. The British Association for Music Therapy recommends a floor of from £52.00 upwards for an individual session¹⁰, which is a floor rather than a typical price, and in the United States the 2021 AMTA workforce analysis put the median at $79 an hour¹¹. Some practitioners charge less online because nobody travels, and some do not.

Before a first online session, five questions do most of the work: which register are you on, what will we do differently because we are not in a room, what happens if the call drops at a bad moment, what do you keep afterwards and where, and who do you contact if you are worried about me. None of this is a reason to stop or delay any treatment somebody already has. Online or in person, this work sits alongside care, and whether a screen suits a particular person is a question for the therapist and the clinician who knows them.