Autism and Music

Autism and music do definitely go together, but it can be a challenge for the parents, the child, and the teacher.

Personally, I have teaching experience with only one child with autism, and another one with Asperger's Syndrome.

Teaching younger kids can be difficult enough, but special needs students require extra attention and patience.

My student with autism is charming and polite, and always willing to do what I ask. He is a storyteller, and loves to talk about his favorite things -- mostly the video games he's been playing, the cartoons he's been drawing, and what mischief his baby brother has been up to.

My piano student is not one of those "autistic savants" -- one of those individuals who perform brilliantly within a narrow specialization. He is just a nice kid who enjoys music, especially music with which he is familiar.

Though he is willing to take instruction, his autism means his processing time for questions and directions can be slow.

I have found that I can direct him to do something, but then I must wait for him to work it out...without interrupting his thinking with another comment.

If I do interrupt, he may have to start the process over again almost from the beginning, typical for children with autism.

This makes things pretty hard for him in public school (he does attend school currently), because he seems mature and is very high-functioning in a lot of ways...but he needs more time than kids without autism to work things out.

I have learned to curb my natural impetuosity and occasional flamboyant teaching style somewhat during his lessons, because he finds my enthusiasm more confusing than exciting.

Usually he doesn't understand humor as intuitively as other kids, so I can't always interact with him in just the same way as with other students. (Actually, this is true with ANY student -- a teacher finds that what works with one child finds no response in another child.)

Nevertheless, it is a pleasure to teach him and see him make progress.

My student struggles with rhythm. Where others count numbers evenly spaced ("1...2...3...4..."), he may count "1-2....1-2...1,1,1-2!" (Although lots of piano students in the first couple of years will do this, even past Level 1.)

Counting with a metronome, rather than helping, is terribly distracting for him.

Staying focused is very hard for kids with autism. His mother has told me that tree branches moving outside the window will also break up his concentration...and indeed I can see him struggling to re-focus numerous times during a lesson.

Hand gestures from me (as in a simple kind of conducting) work much better than a metronome to help him "hold" a half note for its 2 beats, or a whole note for 4 beats.

The music that seems to work best for my autistic student is music he has heard before in video games or movies, famous tunes such as Ode to Joy and Yankee Doodle, and very dramatic melodies such as the first phrase from Bach's Toccata in Dm. (He learned it by rote, one figure at a time.) 

I suspect that my black keys songs would have been a very good start for him, but when he was a beginner I hadn't yet thought of writing these songs.

(I do use this book with not just younger children, but with older kids who seem to learn more slowly.

Their basic note values become second nature, not to mention fingers 2, 3, and 4.)

He LOVES the 12-Bar Blues, which is not really a song at all, but just a group of chords with a simple melody, a pattern that gets more and more complex as students' abilities increase and we add more to it.

When the Fabers of FJH Music came out with their series "My First Piano Adventures," I took him out of the regular Primer ("the Purple Book," as we call it at my studio) and switched him to the B level book of the new series. It was pretty easy for him, giving him reachable goals from month to month. He tends to stay on the same couple of pieces for about 3 weeks. He is now in the C Book, over halfway through, and doing fine. (Update: Now I would have him in the series The Perfect Start for Note Reading, because the quirky graphics and song lyrics are more age-appropriate for him, and there is more repetition of the same notes over and over again. I'm really impressed by the series.) 

It turns out that actual note-reading is not too hard for my student, though like a lot of kids, he finds it difficult to make changes and correct errors, once he has been playing a piece for a few days. 

Therefore, introduction of new things must be done carefully and with enough time to do a thorough job!  No waiting until the end of the lesson to pop something new on this boy!

His biggest problem seems to be a failure to "hear" how the song should be executed. Frequently, his pieces don't feel like they have a direction, a goal --it sounds more like his fingers are tapping computer keys, rather than one note leading to the next.

Unless he really likes a piece of music, he may not be focused enough to make it SOUND like music. But he CAN make some of his pieces sound musical.

His hand position is still not entirely what it should be. Though he has a decent arch in the shape of his hand posture, his finger number 5 is always wanting to curl under his palm, in a way I've never seen in any other student.

I tend not to try to fix everything in one lesson; this is a boy with a lot of challenges at school, and autistic kids can be prone to depression. I want him to improve, but I don't want to add to the burdens in his life.

Over the last few years, I've given him such music as the Pink Panther, Imperial March (from Star Wars), Spiderman, the James Bond Theme, the Batman Theme... you get the picture. 

All these pieces were re-arranged by me into simple adaptations, with as rich a harmony as I could contrive that I felt wouldn't overwhelm my student. (I'm sorry I can't share them with you -- copyright issues-- but I am sure you can figure them out for your student yourself.)

He also loves Halloween music --it has mood, drama, a sense of story behind it. FJH's Spotlight I has a few fun Halloween pieces at the beginning of the book.

I have also written some easy and creepy-sounding Halloween pieces suitable for early readers, being right around Middle C position, which have been great favorites of his.

Over time, I have decided to teach my autistic piano-player pretty much the way I teach all my students, but more slowly, and with much more repetition.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned with him is:

Teach it the first time the way I want him to play it eventually. No simplified versions along the way to getting to the difficult version. His memory is too long, and apparently too inflexible.

For example, he learned the easiest version of Hark How the Bells (Carol of the Bells, or Ukrainian Bell Carol) in which the left hand takes the primary motif. Then,some time later, I decide it was time for him to learn the regular "easy" version. WRONG!

Despite careful preparation each week with the new version and the rhythmic motif in the right hand, lesson after lesson he would come back, look at the new music, and play the old version!  I decided it was not a good use of our time, and that we will re-visit the song MUCH later.

I made the same mistake with the 12-Bar-Blues, giving him an easier, but different right hand part than I gave my other students, knowing we would eventually switch.

Again, bad idea. He had a hard time letting go of the old pattern, because it was so ingrained (and he liked it).

This time I persevered, treating the piece as a duet between him and me, and at last we won through.

One week, he finally played the basic pattern for me, WITH SYNCOPATION, just as well as any other student. Now the door to using all of the blues scale is opening for him.

The summer before he entered the 6th Grade of public school (age 11 or so here in the U.S.) I was a little concerned about the mandatory band requirement. 

While I would not want to say that any child with a desire to be in a musical group should be persuaded not to join, I was worried about the attitude of the other kids when he failed to keep the beat. This is an important consideration in a band!

It is hard to balance the needs of an individual child against the aims of a group which necessarily aims for precision.

Of course, beginning bands rarely sound like precision machines.

But my student with autism feels very keenly the disapproval of other school kids, and it is a source of depression for him... potentially a dangerous situation.  (Some kids with autism can become suicidal.)

His parents --apart from any input from me-- decided against his joining band and persuaded the school to give him another option.

My student with autism really does enjoy conquering a piece and playing it with energy. He doesn't polish most of his music, and I probably give him too much to work on, but he steadily improves.

Without lots of review, he does lose his old pieces (well, don't they all?).

I would like to hear strategies from other teachers, or know how they encourage growth in their children with autism... so if you are willing to share your story or your questions with me and visitors to this site, please make use of the invitation form below!  

 To read what others have said about their experiences with music and autistic children, please scroll all the way to the bottom of this page.

The following video is a fascinating interview (part 1 of 6) between Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride (MD, neurology & nutrition) and Dr. Mercola of www.mercola.com, The World's #1 Natural Health Website. Her own son was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, and she hit the ground running, so to speak, to find answers.

What she has to say about a compromised digestive system that fails to nourish the body, and instead turns food into toxicity for the body, was initially eye-popping, at least for me.

But by now , everyone has heard of how gut problems compromise total health, including the central nervous system.

It is Dr. Campbell-McBride's contention that many afflictions which bear different names, such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, depression, ADHD and ADD, as well as dyslexia and dyspraxia, all share a common origin with autism -- the condition of the digestive system.

Her book deals not with the symptoms of these challenges, but with going to the source and changing the health of the gut.

If you would like to go to the page on YouTube.com that contains the rest of the six videos, CLICK HERE. You may also wish to check out her book, Gut and Psychology Syndrome: Natural Treatment for Autism, Dyspraxia, A.D.D., Dyslexia, A.D.H.D., Depression, Schizophrenia.

And please check out "Vaxxed" the movie if you haven't yet watched the story of CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) whistleblower Dr. William Thompson. 

Dr. Thompson claims the members of his study team at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) were ordered in 2004 to bring a trash can and destroy all their documents regarding the potentially harmful effects of the MMR vaccine (measles/mumps/rubella).

Contrary to the understanding of most parents and the general public (and sadly, the medical profession too), the MMR is the ONLY vaccine that has been studied in any depth by the U.S.'s own researchers. 

And that study was fraudulent, according to Dr. William Thompson, the CDC whistleblower whom Congress still delays calling upon (being a government employee still, he cannot testify against the CDC unless Congress subpoenas him... he has been waiting since 2014, while still working at the CDC).

And from a paper by Dr.Theresa Deisher, discoverer of human adult stem cells,

"The perceived link between childhood vaccines and autism has generated significant press and controversy since 1992. The suggested link has been, and is today, the MMR vaccine.  Since 1983, the MMR vaccine in the US has only been produced using aborted fetal cells.

"Coincidentally, severe autism began to rise in the US in 1983, increasing from less than 1 child per 10,000 to 16-17 children per 10,000 (or about 1 in 500) by 1990.

"The aborted fetal produced MMR was introduced to the UK almost a decade later, and an immediate rise in autism levels was noted, which led to the suspected link between the vaccine and autism." 

Please visit my other pages with additional information about teaching techniques that can be useful when teaching children with autism, and for finding a teacher for your child:

ARE YOUR FEELINGS HURT BY THIS PAGE?

Recently I received a letter from a reader from the UK, who took me to task for spreading "anti-vax propaganda." This person said,

I replied to this reader:

I AM very emotional about vaccine damage, which is covered up and denied by both your government and mine.

When I say that aborted human fetal tissue is used to manufacture MMR (and other live virus vaccines such as Hepatitis A, rabies, shingles, and chickenpox, known as varicella - which I understand you are lucky enough NOT to endure in the UK -) I am quoting directly from the U.S. CDC's own list of vaccine ingredients called the Vaccine Excipient & Media Summary Table.  Here is a link: 

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/b/excipient-table-2.pdf

The CDC stands for "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention".  This excipient list used to be 4 pages long, but is shorter now, because as people "wise up" to what the ingredients are, the CDC is surreptitiously dropping off mention of some of them, bit by bit. 

I have a 4-page Table from 2017 that includes MORE ingredients, including the human fetal tissue elements, which can be identified by the terms "human albumin," "MRC-5", "human diploid cells", and "WI-38".  The MRC-5 was a little boy; the WI-38 was a Swedish baby girl.

(And who wants pig gelatin in an injected product anyway?  Neither kosher nor halal.)

You are mistaken about the MMRVAXPRO - it does indeed have human fetal residue - a very quick search online brought me to this UK site:

https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/6307/smpc

(See where it says "produced in WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts.")

I appreciate that your passion about this issue led you to write to me, but you apparently haven't been moved to do even the minimum of research.  It is very hard to have one's world view challenged - I get that.  It is cognitive dissonance - a paradigm shift.

Right now, it is you who are believing propaganda.  Once I was where you are.  

I wish you luck in going down this rabbit hole, or I challenge you to PROVE ME WRONG.  Bare assertions are not enough.

Thanks for writing,

Dana

SO, DEAR READERS, IF YOUR FEELINGS ARE HURT...

 ...LET THOSE FEELINGS ROUSE YOU TO DO A BIT OF RESEARCH. 

I care less about offending people than I do about the lives of families with autistic members.  I cannot begin to imagine the hardships and sorrows of living with children who can never reach the potential they were born with.

Another recent letter

N. R. M. Roshak:

Thank you for the music teaching resources! I wanted to write to let you know of a mistake on this page in the NON-musical, NON-teaching discussion. You wrote:

"I have a 4-page Table from 2017 that includes MORE ingredients, including the human fetal tissue elements, which can be identified by the terms "human albumin," "MRC-5", "human diploid cells", and "WI-38".  The MRC-5 was a little boy; the WI-38 was a Swedish baby girl."

First, you are absolutely correct that the original cells for the WI-38 and MRC-5 cell lines came from a aborted fetuses. WI-38 is a cell line created from a 3-month-old aborted fetus, and MRC-5 from a 2-week-old aborted male fetus. They were both created in the 1960s, before "ethics review panels" were a thing. The two fetuses weren't aborted for vaccine reasons, and these cell lines weren't created for vaccines; but cells descended from them (by many, many, many generations!) are now used to grow viruses for vaccines. (These cell lines are also used for other medical research as well.)

The mistake I'm writing you about is that these WI-38 cells are not INCLUDED in the vaccine. They are used to produce the viruses that go into the vaccine. You can see this in the ingredients list you quoted:

"Measles virus1 Enders' Edmonston strain (live, attenuated) ……….not less than 1x103 CCID50*

Mumps virus1 Jeryl Lynn™ [Level B] strain (live, attenuated)………not less than 12.5x103 CCID50*

Rubella virus2 Wistar RA 27/3 strain (live, attenuated) ………………….not less than 1x103 CCID50*

*50% cell culture infectious dose

1 produced in chick embryo cells.

2 produced in WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts."

Please note that it says "produced in" WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts. To make the vaccine, they first make a cell culture of these lung cells, then infect the culture with the virus. Only the virus goes into the vaccine, not the cells themselves. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_fetal_tissue_in_vaccine_development) 

Thank you again for the resources!

Dana:

Thank you for your thoughtful letter, N.R.M!  I appreciate your perspective, and  I respect the time and effort that you took to look into this difficult issue.

However, I'm not in error.  If you had read my comments a bit more carefully, you would have noticed that I DID say, "See where it says 'produced in WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts.'"

Nevertheless, the CDC excipient table (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/b/excipient-table-2.pdf) does say of the chickenpox  vaccine Varivax, 

The shingles vaccine is very similar, with "MRC-5 human diploid CELLS, including DNA & protein" at the beginning of the list of ingredients.

Why does the CDC say that actual cells are part of the vaccine?  I don't know.

Even if the fetal tissue was only a part of a process, it is impossible to completely purify the final product.  

Dr. Theresa Deisher of SoundChoice.org maintains that the level of fetal human DNA left behind in childhood vaccines is more than the amount needed to get labor going - and plenty to cause autoimmune issues.  See her comment in the paper "An Open Letter to Legislators Regarding Fetal Cell DNA in Vaccines" (https://www.soundchoice.org/open-letter-to-legislators/):

Is This a Moral Issue?

Even if the presence of human DNA in vaccines wasn't harmful to the recipient's body, there are many who feel strongly that the use of fetal tissue is abhorrent and immoral.  I feel that way.

And it is not an issue of old, "immortal" cell lines from 50 years ago... the harvesting of babies for their body parts and tissue is ongoing.

Even upcoming vaccines apparently in development right now for the current perceived crisis in our country (I'm writing in April 2020) by Johnson and Johnson and Moderna will be using fetal cell lines, new and improved!

See the headlines at Children of God For Life.

Sadly, we have been lied to for YEARS.

The chief scientist of W.H.O. (World Health Organization), back before COVID.  Here she is stating in a Public Service Announcement that vaccines are safe, and then 5 days later saying the opposite at a summit:

Teaching Autistic Children

Where Can I Find a Teacher?

Sites for More Info on Teaching Music to Kids on the Spectrum:

Autism and Music 

Teaching Autistic Children

My Child Has Autism: How Can I Find a Music Teacher?

AutismOneMedia YouTube channel - a source of medical, legal, and political education

Autism & Interactive Toys, by Helen Nichols

AspergersAndPDD.com

AmericanMusicTherapy

MusicForSpecialKids

Dianna:
Your website is a light in the darkness. THANK YOU for all you do in helping to spread the love of music. It matters!

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About the Author

Dana Thynes

Hi, I'm Dana!  (Say that like "Anna".)  I'm the owner of Music-for-Music-Teachers.com, and a newer site, SingTheBibleStory.com.

Like some of you, I've been playing the piano since early childhood, and have added a few other instruments along the way, plus an interest in arranging and composing music.

You can find out more about me and the reason for this website at my About Me page.