Introduction to My Dissertation
Introduction
I
wouldn’t be writing a dissertation about music therapy with autistic children
had I not reflected on the value music has for myself first. Long before I had
heard about the term ‘music therapy’, I realised that music can have effects on
a person’s life. You don’t have to be a musician to be aware of these effects.
Think about how you react when you listen to a particular song or piece of
music. It may change your mood. It may make you feel sad. It may make you feel
aggressive. It may give you the energy to stand up and dance or to sing along
with it even though you were never taught how. Perhaps you have wondered what
brings you so emotionally close to the performer or the composer or to the
people sharing the music with you. On the contrary, music may also have been a
means of escapism. Perhaps sometimes you felt like shutting yourself away from
the world and music was the only refuge.
In
my experience as a musician, music was often a means of self-expression and
communication. Music gave me the opportunity to express feelings, which are
difficult to express in verbal language. Having had the opportunity to play or
sing in an ensemble helped me to realise more and more that music can be an
excellent means of communicating emotions, both with other musicians and with an
audience. These music-making experiences can be very intimate and the pleasure
derived from them is often unexplainable through words. I realised that music is
a way of bringing musicians and audience close to each other. I realised that
music is a means of communication that can bring people together, even though
often they barely know each other.
With these thoughts in my mind, I wondered if music has a special value to
children who are not able to express their feelings in words, children who find
communication difficult, children who are isolated in a world of their own and
who do not seem to be interested to share experiences with others: children with
autism. Questions came to my mind: Does music give these children an opportunity
to be expressive? Can music be an alternative way of communication for them? Can
music-making be a means of sharing a pleasurable experience? Now that music
therapy is also being offered in Malta, I took this opportunity to satisfy my
curiosity.
Autism is a challenging disorder. Parents and professionals continually explore
ways to reach out to a particular child with autism. The aim of this
dissertation is to study the different techniques music therapists use with
autistic children and how these could be of therapeutic value to the children.
In the second chapter, a review of the literature about the subject of this
dissertation is presented, discussing what researchers have found out about
autism, the treatments used, the use of music therapy with autistic children and
the different techniques used. In the third chapter, a description of how the
study was conducted is given. In the fourth chapter, an analysis of the data and
a discussion of the findings are presented. The fifth chapter concludes this
study and gives suggestions for further research in the field of music therapy
with autistic children.
Updated by
Suzanne Marie Bezzina on Sunday, 9th
March, 2003
