Clive Robbins, a developer of an influential brand of music therapy designed to help people with various disabilities meet the physical, mental and social challenges that are facts of everyday life, died Wednesday at his home in Jersey City, N.J. He was 84.

His death was announced by the Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy at New York University. Alan Turry, the center’s managing director, said Robbins had been ill with cancer and heart disease for some time.

With his wife, Carol, Robbins established the center in 1989 and was its founding director. Part of the university’s graduate program in music therapy, the center is responsible for professional training, clinical care and research, rooted in the particular brand of music therapy conceived by Robbins and Paul Nordoff more than 50 years ago.

Robbins, a British-born special-education teacher, and Nordoff, an American pianist and composer, first joined forces in England in the late 1950s. Their aim was to design a therapy, centered on music, that would help hard-to-reach children acquire linguistic and social skills.

Known as Nordoff-Robbins music therapy, their method is now used by hundreds of therapists around the world to treat people of all ages. The conditions treated include autism, mental retardation, psychiatric illnesses, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and physical and learning disabilities.

Today there are also Nordoff-Robbins centers in London; Seoul, South Korea; and Kingswood, Australia.

The Nordoff-Robbins method takes as its philosophical starting point the belief that responsiveness to music lives in everyone, that music has deep power as a communicative tool and that the experience of two people making music together is an inherently empathetic one.

Where other schools of music therapy might integrate music into more traditional treatment — like talk therapy — in the Nordoff-Robbins approach the music is not so much an adjunct to therapy as it is the stuff of therapy itself.

Nordoff-Robbins therapists, who are skilled musicians and accomplished improvisers, use music to mirror a patient’s emotional state throughout a session. Joy, anger, sadness and the shifts among them — as well as physical behaviors like the repetitive movements made by an autistic child — can be immediately reflected in the changing melodic lines, rhythms and tempos the therapist plays on the piano or guitar.

Patients are encouraged to participate in the music-making — beating drums, strumming guitars, singing — which enhances verbal, social and physical skills.

“We are so full of rhythm and pitch,” Robbins told the newspaper The Australian in 2007, “so it’s very natural for us to move into music. Some of us like music that’s heavy with pulse: that makes us feel solid. Others like music that’s light and playful; some like romantic music or thoughtful music. We can find in music an extension of our own needs.”

The Nordoff-Robbins method neither aims nor promises to cure its patients. Rather, as Robbins explained in a 1994 interview with the CBS News program “America Tonight,” “We try to unfold the abilities we can reach and develop them, so the child has more equipment for living.”