Music & The Brain
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Pitch black: Music without vision
This week I had a musical experience that I must share with you, dear reader. To make things even more interesting the event in question led me to spend some of my spare time this week investigating an area of music psychology about which I knew almost nothing – what is it like to listen to music when you are blind? A few weeks ago I had a very kind invitation from the Southbank Centre in London to attend a night at the London Jazz Festival called ‘Phronesis: Pitch Black’.The event was to feature the talents of London-based jazz trio Phronesis, which comprises Copenhagan-born Jasper Høiby on bass, Ivo Neame…
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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…
