Music: magical window to the autistic soul

In the last few years, I've discovered still another magical side of music, through the relationship with my 8-year old autistic son. While practicing the bass, I could notice how his attention would shift from whatever he would be doing, drawn by my plucking of the strings, and the simultaneous sound this would produce through the speakers of my little practice amplifier. I'd then lay the bass on the bed, so that he could explore the sounds, plucking gently the strings, showing some surprise with the connection between his touching the strings, and a matching sound being produced. Throughout the years, he has consistently shown a higher level of interest in our musical exploration sessions than he would typically demonstrate in other activities.

More recently, I started rehearsing Brazilian jazz and popular music with a singer. Once a week we go through a repertoire spanning many different aspects of the sounds of Brazil. The coupling of her sweet voice and the markedly rhythmic guitar arrangements that I have been putting together, have again cast a spell on Ricky. Most times, when he is in the living room with us, he finds in our practice sessions a soothing time where he quiets down, observing attentively, showing sometimes awe, sometimes puzzlement, on how we can make match the textures of the rhythmic guitar chords with sung melodies in such a sweet way.

These experiences have made me more attentive to the fact that, always, when at bedtime myself or my wife, we sing songs or variations of songs that he has heard a few times before, say, a Brazilian nursery rhyme or child's song, he quiets down to listen, looking deeply into our eyes, and sometimes singing along a few scattered words. We have enjoyed these moments together, providing him a sense of safeness and connection that has also been very rewarding to ourselves. Slowly, through the years, we've been able to develop with him a repertoire of a handful of songs which he can actually sing most of the words, either prompted with the first two or three words of the song, or with the first word or two of each verse. He now can sing along a small number of songs, mostly in Portuguese, and gradually more in English, as well.

Based on our experience, it was not surprising to find out that results published this year from a recent study conducted by Dr. Ami Klin, of the Yale Child Study Center, have confirmed that the synchronous nature of sound and movement captures consistently the attention of autistic children, more than any other form of interaction with objects or people (such as eye contact, touch, or movement and sounds in isolation). In a recent interview, Klin said:

"I and colleagues looked at a way [...] 2-year-olds with autism would look at adult care givers, [...] and those children spend less time looking at people's eyes and more time looking at people's mouth [...] And that was puzzling because the eyes are really the window for the soul, they are the way that we experience people, their emotions and their intentions. And so we are puzzled by the fact that they showed increased attention to the mouth. With [...] the new insights, we raised the hypothesis that the reason why they were looking at mouth is because the mouth is the part of the face that contains the greatest audio-visual synchrony, lip movements and speech sounds co-occurring."

Our experience with music, which is a generalization of this synchronicity between movement and sound, provides, in our minds, a further confirmation of the results published by Dr. Ami Klin and his colleagues at Yale. His new insights provide further, scientific proof, to why music therapy programs, such as the few we have contacted here in Australia to strengthen the basis of our daily interactions with our son, are so successful, providing not eyes, but music as a window to the souls of autistic children.