Abstract:

For twenty five years original pathways of OrchestralMusicTherapy (OMT) have involved – at Esagramma in Milano and in other Italian cities – more then one thousand of kids, young and adults with intellectual impairments, autism, sensorial, motoric or relational impairments and disabilities.

A Chamber Orchestra or a Symphonic Orchestra can become progressively more accessible to persons with special needs and to everybody who wants to experience new ways of self identification transforming and modulating rigidities due to limits or personal skills.

The development of a strong relationship with a musical instrument (a violin, a cello, a bass, an orchestral drum, a xylophone or a vibraphone, an harp, etc.), the progressive competence in sharing complex polyphonic interactions (from marches, lullabies and choral to suites and symphonies) and the development of the personal musical behavior allow important relational and personal results even in case of severe autism.

The observed results have demonstrated that even when the cognitive, relational, and verbal skills of the special musicians were at the beginning very compromised it is possible to involve - all around the world - kids and adults in participative orchestras (composed by experts and by persons with special needs) playing in important theaters for classical concerts and sharing rearranged classical scores (of Beethoven, Dvorak, Mahler, Mussorgskij, Stravinskij, etc.)

The paper synthetically introduces the OMT methodology and presents the use of the OMT Observation Protocol to evaluate the musical behavior of four autistic children. Important consideration will be given referring to the impact of the OMT pathway on the relational and cognitive skills of the young special musicians.

The paper will introduce also an enrichment of the proposed observing protocol relied to opportunity of automatically detect some interesting parameters of the most correlated variable.

The good results obtained – and demonstrated by the results described in the paper – have been reinvested in Multimodal and Multimedia Interaction pathways (MMI) where the development of the expressiveness of voice and gesture of kids with special needs are encouraged using the efficient strategies discovered during the OMT pathways and using innovative ICT solutions (based on augmented realities, multimodal environments and speech and language processing techniques).

Keywords:

OrchestralMusicTherapy, Autism, result observation protocol.