Evidence for how music can help with autism

[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 1, No. 1  19 March - 2 April 2007 ]

Leading Australian and international experts will gather at the University of Melbourne this month for a seminar presenting new evidence confirming the usefulness of music therapy in the education of children and young people with autism.

Presentations from Australian, Danish and South Korean experts will illustrate the benefits of using music to help address attentional behaviours, self-expression, emotional communication and social interaction of young people with Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnoses.

Negative media

The seminar, organised by Associate Professor Denise Grocke and Dr Katrina McFerran (Faculty of Music), has MacGeorge Bequest financial support.

Dr McFerran says some media coverage of music therapy in the past couple of years has questioned the usefulness of music as a therapeutic intervention.

“The media coverage was not based on any academic rigour, as our research is”, she says. “But it still has the capacity to undermine people’s confidence in what we are able to achieve.”