Autism and music

SMM - The ability to hear absolutely has been strikingly re-evaluated in recent decades. Since the 19th century, it has been romanticized as a distinguishing feature given by nature or God to "true" music professionals. It was almost taken for granted that absolute listeners were more accurate in their perception and reproduction of music than non-absolute listeners. Accuracy, in turn, was unquestioningly regarded as a sign of quality. More accurate playing was often equated with more expressive playing. According to the narrative, absolute listeners were therefore regarded as a separate caste of virtuosos of emotional expression.

However, these simple connections between emotionality, precision and absolute hearing are increasingly being questioned today. A dissertation by neuroscientist Teresa Wenhart, supervised by music physiologist Eckhart Altenmüller, makes a significant contribution to this. Recently, the author writes in the summary of the work, two studies have reported an increase in autistic personality traits in musicians with absolute pitch. Several case studies and studies with small samples had found frequent occurrences of absolute pitch in autistic people. In addition, similar brain connectivity in terms of over- and under-connectivity of the brain has been reported in several studies of both populations. However, it is still unclear how this coincidence can be explained. Irritating for the traditional narrative of the connections between music, absolute pitch and emotionality is that the ability for cognitive empathy is not at all or only weakly developed in the case of autimus, as a study by Bons, Egon van den Broek and Floor Scheepers ("Motor, emotional, and cognitive empathy in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and conduct disorder", Journal of abnormal child psychology. Volume 41, Number 3, April 2013, pp. 425-443).

Since the critical period for the formation of absolute pitch overlaps with a period of detail-oriented perception during normal child development, a detail-oriented "cognitive style" typical of autism, that is, "the predisposition to process incoming sensory information in a particular way, could serve as a common framework for explaining the similarities."

Wenhrt examined a total of 64 music professionals, using electroencephalography, measurements of autistic symptoms and auditory and visual experiments, among other things. In general, absolute-hearing listeners showed more autistic characteristics than relative-hearing listeners. The observed effects suggest that absolute-hearing listeners tend to have more detail-oriented processing and less contextual integration than relative-hearing listeners.

This is also evident in the brain structures. According to Wenhart, a typical human brain has an efficient network of strongly interconnected modules (segregation) and few cross-connections between these modules (integration). In her study, however, absolute-hearing subjects showed largely reduced integration and segregation as well as reduced interhemispheric connections compared to relative-hearing subjects.

The study suggests that absolute pitch and autism may be linked by similarities in cognitive style and brain connectivity. According to Wenhart, inconsistencies in the results also reflect the heterogeneity of absolute hearing as a phenomenon.

Literature:

Teresa Wenhart: Absolute pitch ability, cognitive style and autistic traits: a neuropsychological and electrophysiological study. Dissertation (University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover), Hannover, 2019.