MUSIC THERAPY
Music is increasingly used as part of early intervention programmes for children with autism, as it has been recognised that musical interaction stimulates similar communicative behaviour to the early emotional interaction between mother and infant, which is crucial to the later development of social skills.
For any age group, music therapy is most usually part of a multi-disciplinary programme, offering an enriched learning environment for development of communication and other aspects of a child's personality.
The treatment is based on the understanding that all people have an innate responsiveness to music, that this instinct can remain in spite of physical, cognitive or emotional handicap, and that it can be used to build a relationship between the therapist and the client.
Music therapists talk of the rhythm of our heartbeat, melody in the spoken voice, and turn-taking in the interaction between an infant and its mother as evidence that musicality is a basic human characteristic.
Robarts (1998: 176) describes these phenomena as a musical hierarchy or orchestration of self-regulation and self-organisation. And because music is so integral to our being, by working ... to free the persons musical limitations, resistances and defences, and by building on the strengths of his or her musical elements, components and structures within an improvisational relationship, we are simultaneously working towards healing the other aspects of her or his cognitive, physical, neurological and emotional being.
For a more detailed article....here is the link to The National Autistic Society website