rosetta stone and the oud

after exhanging a few emails with moby, i realized he has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. sure, he has a self-professed interest in music therapy and seems to support those who offer it, but his grasp of it is as profound as what most greenwich trophy wives have for their favorite charities.

i know that reeks of cynicism, and i’m probably being less than fair to some of the wives; but because i know just enough to be annoying about both music and science, i can’t help but to take things a little personally when people bullshit me about either.

research by daniel levitin and others have shown that our ability to enjoy music is intimately linked with our social brain. in one study on williams syndrome, a genetic disorder where intellectual disability is typically accompanied by excessively social personality, levitin found that affected children seem to enjoy music more than their normally developing counterparts.

"compared to all other groups [e.g. kids with autism or down syndrome] including the controls [i.e. normally developing children],” he noted, “the ws individuals displayed greater emotional responses to music, manifested interest in music at an earlier age, and spent more hours per week listening to music. in addition, the effects of music listening (whether positive or negative) tended to last longer in the ws group.”

kids with williams syndrome have extraordinary musical aptitude in spite of their intellectual disability suggests intelligence, at least the way we currently define it, has little to do with their love of music, and in turns their humanity. this comparison is especially striking with kids with autism because they suffer from social-communication deficits, which also seem to rob them of some of the pleasure associated with music. as a researcher once told me, “understanding autism is like deciphering the rosetta stone of human behavior.”

i was in doha a few months ago visiting a developmental disability research center. at one point of the tour, we joined a bunch of kids in their music class. some were clearly autistic, but even those who were not seemed dull and detached.

the instructor was a trim, earnest-looking man with a balding head just shiny enough to be distracting. he took out an oud and started playing a serpentine arabic melody. to my surprise, the kids stopped what they were doing, gathered around him and, one by one, started swaying to the music.

Posted by cellpharmer at August 10, 2007 04:59 PM