In a room dubbed the E-WoMP (exploratory world-music playground) that serves as the centerpiece of the Music-Play Project housed at the Tallahassee-based Florida State University’s (FSU) College of Music, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are making impressive gains in creativity, emotional regulation, and social participation.

FSU ethnomusicologist Michael B. Bakan, PhD, likes to call such gains “response-ability.” He’s the director of the medical ethnomusicology program, which uses an array of unusual musical instruments from around the world for improvisational music-play activities that help create a unique therapeutic environment.

“Our program emphasizes ability and 'personhood' over disability and ‘treatment’ and accepts that there are different ways of interacting, just as there are different ways of making music in different cultures,” says Bakan, an associate professor in the College of Music. “The Music-Play Project fosters the growth of response-ability, and in turn, happiness, because it gives children the chance to contribute to the co-creation of culture who too often are characterized as being incapable of doing so.”

Bakan and FSU colleague Benjamin Koen, PhD, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology, developed, launched, and now oversee the interdisciplinary project in collaboration with researchers at the university’s Center for Autism and Related Disabilities and College of Medicine.

The Music-Play Project welcomes children three at a time to the E-WoMP, where they can choose from among safety-modified, world-music options, such as Balinese gamelan instruments, a West Javanese angklung (tuned bamboo-tubes rattle), and a West African gyil (xylophone), and more. Less exotic choices might include homemade shakers, small cymbals, and slide-whistles. Soft, colorful rubber swimming-pool dive sticks are used as mallets. Bakan describes all the instruments as “high yield for low input” because they yield satisfying sounds with minimal effort and require little or no technical competence.

Children can freely explore the creative and social possibilities in the E-WoMP on their own terms or with one another. Other options are that a parent can accompanying the child or Bakan and Koen can serve as music-play facilitators. “By supporting a child’s expression and creativity, following instead of leading, responding rather than directing, and integrating instead of teaching, our approach helps children on the autism spectrum in ways that more directive, skills development-based interventions, music-related or otherwise, may not,” Bakan says.

Participants in the Music-Play Project are first evaluated and then referred to the program by the FSU Center for Autism and Related Disabilities. To date, there have been three six-week programs of weekly, hour-long sessions, which Bakan and colleagues aim to further develop and eventually expand. For a comprehensive overview of the Music-Play Project, there’s “Following Frank: Response-Ability and the Co-Creation of Culture in a Medical Ethnomusicology Program for Children on the Autism Spectrum,” a paper authored by Bakan and published in a recent edition of the journal Ethnomusicology.

“Following Frank” also describes a 2006 study of the Music-Play Project that focused on a memorable 6-year-old participant called “Frank” (not his real name), whose autism-related challenges were profound and pervasive compared to those of most of his music-play peers. Even so, Bakan observed remarkable, positive changes in the child’s response-ability during E-WoMP sessions that also were evident in his social interactions at home.

“The medium of free music-play can help children with ASDs to gain confidence and self-esteem. And we are seeing this bear fruit not just in the E-WoMP, but also at home, at school, and in peer relationships,” Bakan says. “Both in what it achieves and what it reveals about what is already there, the Music-Play Project at FSU is providing a lens through which others can view these children as creative and social makers of culture.”

Source: Florida State University