Gordon Clark and I recently did some recording at MTC Studio. These kinds of audio visual projects are sometimes the model we use – having a client focus on a medium term goal of recording a favourite song, with or without an accompanying video.

We chose to multi track a tune from the MTC songbook “Movin’and Groovin’ Volume 1″. This is a collection of songs that were written for music therapy goals with children. The book is available through our website – simply send an email.

with the good Doctor at the Super Sunday parade

The parade is a great cultural and musical event, and this year was no exception. The Hot 8 Brass Band was the featured brass band, and they had the second line rockin’ in rhythm through the Central City neighbourhood.

Events like these are a reminder of how important music is to the health of a society. I have been privileged to have attended Carnival in Santiago de Cuba and now Super Sunday in New Orleans. Both cities are, by North American standards, poor. But, their rich, vibrant, and most importantly, living musical cultures make them healthier societies than many places that have “more”. What they lack materially is more than made up with the sense of community that much of our modern world has shunned.

Next year Carnival in Rio?

Also, just a few days ago a new book by Kate Winslet (yes, the actress!) called The Golden Hat was released in an effort to raise awareness about living with Autism.  The book has a lot of star power behind it; lots of pictures of movie stars hanging out with people with Autism, while wearing a magical “golden hat”.  Here is the poem that inspired the idea for the book:

THE GOLDEN HAT (by Keli Thorsteinsson)

THIS BOY HAD A GOLDEN HAT.

THE HAT WAS MAGICAL. IT COULD TALK.

THE BOY DID NOT HAVE ANY VOICE. HE HAD AUTISM.

HIS HAT WAS ALWAYS WITH HIM.

HIS HAT WAS LOST ONE DAY.

NOW HE HAD NO WAY OF TELLING THEM HIS STORIES.

HIS MOM AND DAD BECAME SAD.

THEY TAUGHT HIM SPELLING ON A LETTERBOARD.

IT WAS HARD.

END.

What a moving  poem.  What if we did have a magic golden hat?  Sometimes in my music therapy sessions I feel like music can act as a magic hat to help people communicate.  Hans Christian Andersen said that, “Where words fail, music speaks.”

I get to spend this evening hanging out with a bunch of awesome teens who have Autism.  We get to jam and make music together.  Actually, I get to do that every day, because Autism is not something that happens on just one day, or even for one month of a year.  Spread the word today, so that tomorrow people still remember!

I often need to look up lyrics and chords online but have to search through the many different versions that the internet holds, and usually end up making corrections to the chords anyways.  WikiTabs is a community based site where members can edit versions posted to ensure the most correct chords.

WikiTabs also seems to hold a lot of hard to find tabs.  Chords for Beatles songs, for instance, are often hard to find due to sites not being able to post them for copyright reasons.  Here is the Beatles page on WikiTabs:

http://wikitabs.org/wiki/Beatles

Amazing.

Go ahead, type in your favourite artist!  Do you like country? Indie? Heavy Metal?  No problem, wikitabs has it all!

Check it all out at wikitabs.org. Happy strumming!

I started noticing that a lot of my adapted music students who have Autism have absolute pitch (also known as perfect pitch) or something very close to it.  Absolute pitch is defined as the ability to accurately identify a given note in the absence of any other notes.  This means I can play one note on the piano (or any instrument for that matter) and the student, without knowing the key or hearing anything else, can tell me which note I am playing.  I started to wonder if this was because perfect pitch is actually more prevalent in Autism – or were we just seeing musical kids because we are a music studio?  Had parents found us because they noticed their child’s musical abilities or we were seeing a microcosm of a larger trend in people with Autism?

Research shows that both people who are blind and people whose first language is a tone-based language (like Mandarin) DO have a higher prevalence of perfect pitch – actually much higher than the general population.  I went on a search for research to back up my suspicions of this being true for people with Autism.  It seems to be universally accepted that people with Autism do have perfect pitch a lot of the time, especially musical savants and people with higher-functioning Autism.  A lot of the research, however, is qualitative (based on one individual) or focuses only on higher-functioning savant-like participants.  One good (but slightly dated) article I found that compared a group of people with Autism to a neuro-typical control group was:

Bonnel, A. et al. (2003) Enhanced Pitch Sensitivity in Individuals with Autism: A Signal   Detection Analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15-2, 226-235

They found that people with Autism DID score better than the neuro-typical group in identifying and categorizing pitches, suggesting that people with Autism not only have enhanced visual processing, but most likely also have enhanced auditory processing.

This could be one explanation why music therapists are having success using a technique called Melodic Intonation Therapy with pre-verbal children with Autism.  MIT is usually reserved for working with stroke-recovery patients, using pitch repetition to not only recover speech, but also teach the correct intonation.

So, with our perfect or almost perfect pitch students, we are seeing a great propensity to quickly memorize songs and pick out melodies on the keyboard.  Even with one of my lower functioning clients, his memory for pitch surprized me.  One day I sang a new hello song to him, and had him sing along.  Two weeks later, without hearing it again, he picked out the melody on the piano!

One challenge of working with kids with such good ears is that they want to rely on this talent because it is easier for them to play a song by ear than read the sheet music in front of them!  A lot of these same kids have trouble reading in school, and so a big goal is to get them to read sheet music as it increases visual tracking skills.

Even with some challenges, having such a good ear is an amazing talent and I’m so glad these kids get to show off all of their hard work at the year end recital.  Even with talent, music takes practice and dedication.

Have you had an experience with a person with Autism who had great pitch, or have you seen a great article about perfect pitch and Autism?  Leave a comment below!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1895839/Drummers-are-natural-intellectuals.html#.TlwaM9shzNg.facebook

Monday, May 30^th: The WrecK Rockers will be performing as part of Surrey Parks and Rec’s Community inclusion day!   The festivities will be taking place in front of Surrey City Hall, with our performance at about noon!

Saturday, June 4^th: Katherine and the Musical Theatre class will be giving a short performance of “Peter and the Wolf” at the Music Therapy Association of BC’s Symposium on Children and Youth at UBC, in order to share ideas on how to successfully run a musical theatre class for youth.  9 other Music Therapists will also be sharing intervention ideas.  If you are curious about Music Therapy or work with youth this would be a great day to come and see what we are all about and gain some new techniques!

Saturday, June 11^th:  The Wreck Rockers will be performing AGAIN at the ALS walk at Bear Creek Park! Back by popular demand we will be rocking the stage once more.  This is a great event for a great cause.  If you aren’t local there are many community ALS walks – be sure to find one in your neighbourhood!

Saturday June 18^th:  MTC Studio holds a recital at the end of each school year so that our music students who have been working hard all year can finally show off!  This day always makes me so proud.  For the big finale Katherine, Don, Mike and our new intern Gordon will be cooking up a hot tune!  It will be held this year at South Burnaby United Church at 2 pm.  This day will definitely sum up a great year for the Studio!

Hope to see you at these great events!

The Mississippi is also set to flood, and hopefully the sacrifices on both rivers will help save the many more. Climate change is a reality, and so we must devise a new way, and this shift will the challenge facing us as we march onward.