Music and development
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Musical times, they are a-changin’…
Hello, dear reader. This week I thought I would write about the changing world of defining and measuring musicality. Once upon a time it was a simple case of asking someone how many years they had been training as a musician. Maybe you might stretch to how often they had practised in the past or now. But essentially, that was it; one or two numbers which defined an individual’s musicality. And we learned a lot using this method. If it did not work, if it did not throw up fascinating group differences, then it would have disappeared a long time ago. But the fact is that it fostered decades of…
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Do you listen to classical music?
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Music-based therapy helps non-verbal autistic children to utter speech for the first time
For a few years now there has been a great deal of interest in Melodic Intonation Therapy, a singing-based intervention that has been extensively tested by Gottfried Schlaug’s Boston group. This specially adapted sing-song training has been shown to help people with non-fluent aphasia (usually after stroke) regain some ability to speak. Today’s blog is about a variant of this type of therapy that has been tested by one of the Schlaug lab members, Catherine Wan, which can aid speech production in non-verbal autistic children. In June of this year I attended Music and Neurosciences IV conference in Edinburgh and this was where I first heard about Auditory Motor Mapping…
