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persistent_reader's review against another edition
5.0
The subject may seem esoteric - conversations of an ethnomusicology professor with people on the autism spectrum, but it’s anything but dry, ivory tower stuff. These dialogues are fascinating learning experiences and above all very human. The collaborators speak for themselves in their own terms and in their own method of communication. (One interviewee is non verbal.) The conversations also mirrored Dr. Bakan’s growth in empathy and advocacy for the autistic community.
I have a print copy coming in the mail, but I loved the audio version because it made these interactions very real to me, the listener. If you want to learn more and grow in empathy and support for folks on the spectrum, this is a great book because it’s their stories. Their strengths and struggles. Their lives. In their own words.
I have a print copy coming in the mail, but I loved the audio version because it made these interactions very real to me, the listener. If you want to learn more and grow in empathy and support for folks on the spectrum, this is a great book because it’s their stories. Their strengths and struggles. Their lives. In their own words.
gabbilevy's review against another edition
My interview with [a:Michael Bakan|1141540|Michael Bakan|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]:
MUSIC AND MUSIC THERAPY have become widely used and important parts of treatment for people with diagnoses on the autism spectrum disorder, helping them engage, calm and communicate.
After witnessing such an experience with a young autistic relative, Michael Bakan, an ethnomusicology professor at Florida State University, began to explore the possibilities of making music with autistic people, first through the Music-Play Project and later the Artism Ensemble, which paired children on the spectrum and their parents with professional musicians to create and perform original and improvisational works.
In his new book, "Speaking for Ourselves: Conversations on Life, Music, and Autism," Bakan shares his conversations with 10 people who all have diagnoses on the autism spectrum and for whom music is an integral part of their lives.
Through those conversations, and in a recent interview with U.S. News, Bakan challenges many of the ashumptions neurotypical people – people without autism spectrum conditions – make about how autistic people see and interact with the world. Excerpts:
Several of your interviewees, all of whom are on the autism spectrum and have language ability, talk about feeling more comfortable with music, with one even talking about how she sometimes thinks in music and that helps her access language. How does that work?
I don't think it's necessarily that these people are more fluid in music than they are in language. But I think music allows you to more purely engage with the act of communication than spoken dialogue does.
The kind of rules of etiquette and the kind of social demands are actually much looser in a music making environment, and especially if it's a music-making environment where there isn't a predetermined outcome. In conversation, you're having to constantly modulate to satisfy the expectations of the other person, second by second, minute by minute. So I don't think it's language so much that is the challenge, I think it is the social paradigm of language exchange that makes communication difficult for verbal autistic people and why there's a certain kind of fluency in music that exceeds that.
Because we live in a linguo-centric society, where language is so referential, certain words mean certain things, the connotations of the way you use a word, the gestures you make when you utter something, are so deeply coded and so open for being misinterpreted or manipulated if you don't do it right, that if you are set up differently neurocognitively, that can generate a lot of anxiety. Whereas the kinds of environments in which music is made are more sympathetic to a more neurodiverse theater of operation in which people can find meaningful ways in which to interact and communicate.
You refer to the work of Joseph Straus and his ideation of autism as its own cognitive style, and how that led you to consider studying autism through the lens of ethnomusicology, the study of music as culture. What are the common themes that popped up again in your conversations and in your work with musicians on the spectrum?
I've defined ethnomusicology as the study of how people make and experience music and why it matters to them that they do. And essentially the book starts from that question, of how do autistic people make and experience music and why does it matter to them that they do, not them as some large cultural anonymous group without individuals but as individuals who share a certain kind of neurocognitive profile and an interest in music.
I don't really think there is a music of autism. What I think you could say, though, it's consistent with the kind of work that Straus has done, is that there is a way of being in the world that is autistic, and this idea that autistic people take in more information – or at least the information is less variegated in terms of the kinds of hierarchies that maybe neurotypical people immediately, intuitively make. Neurotypical people decide to focus on this person is talking to us, as opposed to the people who are having a conversation elsewhere, whereas in the autistic experience, maybe all of those things are coming in and it's less clear, it's less obvious, which one is more important, which one should be the point of focus.
Ironically, it makes many autistic people more sensitive listeners, more attentive listeners, and actually more socially responsive to the kind of musical cues that happen in an improvisatory situation. And this would seem to totally cut against the grain of how the condition is usually described, because you would ashume the opposite. But there's this real attunedness to the larger surrounding environment, whereas a neurotypical musician would say, 'Well, I'm going to focus on my part, focus on this one other instrumentalist sharing the other thing that's closest to my line, and I'm going to shut out the other kinds of things because I don't want to get distracted.' I think there's a more holistic way of experiencing the soundscape of a musical environment that an autistic person has.
On the other side, because there is so much information – and because there are less filters that immediately kick into place in an intuitive way – there is a tendency to become overwhelmed by so many details. So I think what a lot of autistic musicians will do, whether performing or composing music or people experiencing music in some other ways, they focus in, they select very consciously on some detail, some segment, that they're going to really hone in on because, 'If I don't then I'm going to be lost because everything will come at me.' So there's this paradoxical relationship, where on the one hand, there's more information coming in and there's a more holistic way of processing that information, and on the other hand there's a narrower and more specific point of focus that becomes the place where attention goes.
When I listen to Thelonius Monk's music, for example, to me that speaks very much like an autistic way of communicating. And I'm not saying Monk was autistic and I'm not saying he wasn't. I don't know. I didn't know him and there was no diagnosis at that time for people like him. But if you listen to Monk's music, he'll take one particular motive, one particular figure, and he'll keep working it around, working it around, spinning it upside down, spinning it inside out, and eventually the larger piece takes place around that. So I think there is something in if we wanted to call it the autistic style of approaching music that gravitates toward that molecular level of musical design and then sort of builds inward and outward from that to create the larger whole. That has interesting implications, and there are actually – some of the same musicians have been retrospectively painted with the brush of, 'Maybe they were autistic.' When I listen to their performances or when I listen to their compositions, I can hear that.
Read the rest of the interview here.
MUSIC AND MUSIC THERAPY have become widely used and important parts of treatment for people with diagnoses on the autism spectrum disorder, helping them engage, calm and communicate.
After witnessing such an experience with a young autistic relative, Michael Bakan, an ethnomusicology professor at Florida State University, began to explore the possibilities of making music with autistic people, first through the Music-Play Project and later the Artism Ensemble, which paired children on the spectrum and their parents with professional musicians to create and perform original and improvisational works.
In his new book, "Speaking for Ourselves: Conversations on Life, Music, and Autism," Bakan shares his conversations with 10 people who all have diagnoses on the autism spectrum and for whom music is an integral part of their lives.
Through those conversations, and in a recent interview with U.S. News, Bakan challenges many of the ashumptions neurotypical people – people without autism spectrum conditions – make about how autistic people see and interact with the world. Excerpts:
Several of your interviewees, all of whom are on the autism spectrum and have language ability, talk about feeling more comfortable with music, with one even talking about how she sometimes thinks in music and that helps her access language. How does that work?
I don't think it's necessarily that these people are more fluid in music than they are in language. But I think music allows you to more purely engage with the act of communication than spoken dialogue does.
The kind of rules of etiquette and the kind of social demands are actually much looser in a music making environment, and especially if it's a music-making environment where there isn't a predetermined outcome. In conversation, you're having to constantly modulate to satisfy the expectations of the other person, second by second, minute by minute. So I don't think it's language so much that is the challenge, I think it is the social paradigm of language exchange that makes communication difficult for verbal autistic people and why there's a certain kind of fluency in music that exceeds that.
Because we live in a linguo-centric society, where language is so referential, certain words mean certain things, the connotations of the way you use a word, the gestures you make when you utter something, are so deeply coded and so open for being misinterpreted or manipulated if you don't do it right, that if you are set up differently neurocognitively, that can generate a lot of anxiety. Whereas the kinds of environments in which music is made are more sympathetic to a more neurodiverse theater of operation in which people can find meaningful ways in which to interact and communicate.
You refer to the work of Joseph Straus and his ideation of autism as its own cognitive style, and how that led you to consider studying autism through the lens of ethnomusicology, the study of music as culture. What are the common themes that popped up again in your conversations and in your work with musicians on the spectrum?
I've defined ethnomusicology as the study of how people make and experience music and why it matters to them that they do. And essentially the book starts from that question, of how do autistic people make and experience music and why does it matter to them that they do, not them as some large cultural anonymous group without individuals but as individuals who share a certain kind of neurocognitive profile and an interest in music.
I don't really think there is a music of autism. What I think you could say, though, it's consistent with the kind of work that Straus has done, is that there is a way of being in the world that is autistic, and this idea that autistic people take in more information – or at least the information is less variegated in terms of the kinds of hierarchies that maybe neurotypical people immediately, intuitively make. Neurotypical people decide to focus on this person is talking to us, as opposed to the people who are having a conversation elsewhere, whereas in the autistic experience, maybe all of those things are coming in and it's less clear, it's less obvious, which one is more important, which one should be the point of focus.
Ironically, it makes many autistic people more sensitive listeners, more attentive listeners, and actually more socially responsive to the kind of musical cues that happen in an improvisatory situation. And this would seem to totally cut against the grain of how the condition is usually described, because you would ashume the opposite. But there's this real attunedness to the larger surrounding environment, whereas a neurotypical musician would say, 'Well, I'm going to focus on my part, focus on this one other instrumentalist sharing the other thing that's closest to my line, and I'm going to shut out the other kinds of things because I don't want to get distracted.' I think there's a more holistic way of experiencing the soundscape of a musical environment that an autistic person has.
On the other side, because there is so much information – and because there are less filters that immediately kick into place in an intuitive way – there is a tendency to become overwhelmed by so many details. So I think what a lot of autistic musicians will do, whether performing or composing music or people experiencing music in some other ways, they focus in, they select very consciously on some detail, some segment, that they're going to really hone in on because, 'If I don't then I'm going to be lost because everything will come at me.' So there's this paradoxical relationship, where on the one hand, there's more information coming in and there's a more holistic way of processing that information, and on the other hand there's a narrower and more specific point of focus that becomes the place where attention goes.
When I listen to Thelonius Monk's music, for example, to me that speaks very much like an autistic way of communicating. And I'm not saying Monk was autistic and I'm not saying he wasn't. I don't know. I didn't know him and there was no diagnosis at that time for people like him. But if you listen to Monk's music, he'll take one particular motive, one particular figure, and he'll keep working it around, working it around, spinning it upside down, spinning it inside out, and eventually the larger piece takes place around that. So I think there is something in if we wanted to call it the autistic style of approaching music that gravitates toward that molecular level of musical design and then sort of builds inward and outward from that to create the larger whole. That has interesting implications, and there are actually – some of the same musicians have been retrospectively painted with the brush of, 'Maybe they were autistic.' When I listen to their performances or when I listen to their compositions, I can hear that.
Read the rest of the interview here.
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