Podcast

Music Therapy is not only helpful for stressed out adults, but it also a very good treatment for autistic children. Music therapy for autistic children was an aid introduced to help with communication skills. Autistic children are kids with a disorder of having a difficult time communicating. They also have a difficult time socializing with other people. By not being able to communicate what they want, these children become very stressed. Autistic children ignore or reject the attempts of social contact made by others. Music therapy helps to stop the social withdrawal by an initial object relation with a musical instrument. Instead of viewing the instrument as threatening, they are intrigued by the shape, feel, and sound of it. The musical instrument provides an initial point of contact between the autistic child and the person experimenting what is trying to be said. Music therapy has to be carefully planned out and evaluated to suit the specific needs of each individual autistic child. What may be positively experienced by one child may be negative to another autistic child. When music therapy was introduced it gave hope to allow these types of kids with expressing how they feel. Music therapy allowed autistics the opportunity to experience non-threatening outside stimulation, as they don’t engage in direct human contract. I found one article saying, “Music therapy addresses some of the core problems of people with ASD.” ASD is Autism Spectrum Disorder. This article was an experiment to see if music therapy was successful.
Their background was: The central impairments with autistic spectrum disorder include social interaction and communication. Music therapy uses music and its elements to enable communication and expression, thus attempting to address some of the core problems of people with ASD.
 The results of the three studies were, music therapy was superior to the placebo when testing the verbal and gestural communicative skills.
Each experiment included the musical activities of:
 Listening to music and/or musical creation
 Playing musical instruments (any musical instrument)
 Moving to music
 Singing
Music therapy has also helped with being able to allow the autistic child control the functioning of their teeth, jaw, lips, and tongue. Playing a flute allowed the child to produce some speech vocalizations. Not in all cases but in some.
Music therapy in conclusion:
 taught social skills
 improved language comprehension
 encouraged the desire to communicate
 made some expression clear
 reduced non-communicative speech