Commentary on "Why Does Music Therapy Help in Autism?" by N. Khetrapal

Khetrapal reviews the literature on music and autism and stresses the need for a greater focus on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying both autism and music perception. I build upon this review and discuss the strong connections between speech prosody and emotion in music. These connections imply that emotion recognition training in one domain can influence emotion recognition in the other. Understanding of emotional speech is frequently impaired in individuals with ASD, so music therapy should be explored further as a possible treatment

Music as a means of investigating perception of emotion and social attribution in typical development and in autism spectrum disorders

This thesis uses music as a means of investigating both typical and atypical perception of emotion and attribution of social intent. The primary aim of this thesis is to investigate this perception and attribution in indviduals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and compare this with typical adults and children. Chapter 1 comprises a literature review of music and emotion, and of music cognition in individuals with ASD. The first manuscript (Chapter 2) describes the development of a new method for investigating perception of emotion from musical performance. Using this method, we found that typical adults can reliably rate the emotional content of musical performances which vary in expressive parameters. In the second manuscript (Chapter 3), we used this method to examine the ability of adolescents with ASD to rate the emotional content of musical performance. We compared the group with ASD to a group of typically developing adolescents as well as a group of individuals with Williams syndrome (WS). The results of this study showed that adolescents with ASD are impaired in this kind of emotional recognition relative to both comparison groups. Emotional recognition is an important aspect of everyday social interactions, both in understanding and predicting others' actions. Thus, in the third manuscript (Chapter 4), we examined the effect of musical soundtracks on attribution of social action and intent in ASD by adding music to an established visual task. [...]Dans cette these, la musique est utili see pour investiguer la perceptiontypique et atypique des emotions ainsi que l' attribution d'intentions sociales.L' objectif premier est d' evaluer la perception des emotions et des intentionssociales chez des individus presentant un trouble du spectre autistique (TSA) enles comparant a des .adultes et des enfants dont le developpement est typique. Lepremier chapitre est consacre a une revue de la litterature portant sur la musiqueet les emotions ainsi que sur la cognition de la musique chez des individuspresentant un TSA. Le premier manuscrit (chapitre 2) porte sur le developpement d'une nouvelle methode permettant d'evaluer la perception desemotions associees a des performances musicales. [...

Perception of emotional expression in musical performance

Expression in musical performance is largely communicated by the manner in which a piece is played; interpretive aspects that supplement the written score. In piano performance, timing and amplitude are the principal parameters the performer can vary. We examined the way in which such variation serves to communicate emotion by manipulating timing and amplitude in performances of classical piano pieces. Over three experiments, listeners rated the emotional expressivity of performances and their manipulated versions. In Experiments 1 and 2, timing and amplitude information were covaried; judgments were monotonically decreasing with performance variability, demonstrating that the rank ordering of acoustical manipulations was captured by participants' responses. Further, participants' judgments formed an S-shaped (sigmoidal) function in which greater sensitivity was seen for musical manipulations in the middle of the range than at the extremes. In Experiment 3, timing and amplitude were manipulated independently; timing variation was found to provide more expressive information than did amplitude. Across all three experiments, listeners demonstrated sensitivity to the expressive cues we manipulated, with sensitivity increasing as a function of musical experience