Dyslexia and Music

The connection was not at all what I thought

Many years ago, I attended a talk about the latest research on dyslexia, hoping to learn whether experts thought it affected the reading of music as well as language. I can imagine that out of all students I’ve worked with, some might have had some form of dyslexia, and if I understood more about this problem, I might be able to help them better.

I recently learned that I was right in thinking that dyslexia involves the musical ear, but totally wrong in imagining that it had to do with transposed notes in written music, the way it seems to affect the writing or reading of words.

The talk that I attended was given by two of the world’s top researchers on dyslexia. They described how they used brain scans to watch patients’ brain activity live, and saw that some parts of the language center were not being used as much by dyslexic people, but that they seemed to compensate by making much more use of other parts of the brain, in order to overcome their challenges.

At the end of the talk, I walked up and asked the speakers how dyslexia affected the reading of music. They said, “We haven’t studied that.” They didn’t think there was evidence that the disability had an impact on the playing of music. And that was it. Nobody had really focused on this connection. I was disappointed but not surprised. For some years, I used to ask a friend of mine who’s an expert in linguistics about the latest research connecting the linguistics of speech and music — and the answer always came back, “They haven’t studied that.” I teach music as a language, and constantly refer to its connection to the way we speak, but the experts (or their funders) haven’t examined the idea yet. (If you have heard differently about recent linguistics research, please leave a comment below or reply to this email!)

It turns out that music has been tied into dyslexia, but not at all in the way I imagined. A recent episode of BBC’s “Instant Genius” podcast explored this in an interview with the director of the Center for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Usha Goswami describes dyslexia as a disability in hearing, which then shows up in the visual representation of speech — the moment when people learn to write what they’ve heard. It also appears when they read, because all writing and reading passes through sound in our minds. We hear what we read and write. Some literally read to themselves, others read faster and find shortcuts, but apparently, learning text requires processing it through sound.

The latest research indicates that dyslexia originates, not in reading or writing, but in listening. When we hear speech, it’s as if we are a 16-track recording studio processing many layers of audio at the same time — rhythm, emphasis, consonants vs vowels, sequences of sounds that make words, sequences of words that make phrases and meanings — but the dyslexic listener apparently has trouble syncing all those audio tracks.

In particular, the rhythm track appears to be slightly fuzzy, not precisely matching the rest of the information. This forces dyslexic people to compensate by working a little harder to understand and remember what they heard, and since text is processed in our minds through sound, the disability shows up especially when it comes time to write or read what they’ve heard. Their writing is a visual representation of sound that’s not quite been synced in the brain.

The rhythm part of this sound involves many layers — major rhythms of words and internal rhythms within words. A major part of what allows us to pick up verbal meanings and cues is our ability to hear stressed versus unstressed syllables. Dyslexia messes with this ability.

Professor Goswami compared the problem to surfers looking for the waves big enough to catch a ride on. If they can’t tell the difference between big and small waves, they’ll have trouble choosing the right waves to surf.

Dyslexic patients apparently have trouble discriminating easily between stressed and non-stressed rhythms. They might, for example, have trouble hearing and even saying the difference between conTENT and CONtent.

The connection to music is clear. One of the ways we communicate good music is by bringing out the beat. The beat is what structures each phrase and makes musical sense out of a tune. It’s why I always focus students on consistent bowing, in order to physically bring out the beat notes, and build the other notes around them.

Prof. Goswami points out that treatment of dyslexia is aided by singing, especially of nursery rhymes, where the rhythms of the words are very strong, and closely match the rhythms of the music.

She points out that when people speak to babies and toddlers, they often exaggerate the emphasis of the words in a singsong way. In fact, throughout all languages, she’s found that we tend to create strong emphasis twice per second. This is roughly the same emphasis that we use when playing most dance music, such as jigs, reels, and strathspeys.

One particular difficulty dyslexic patients have when perceiving words and rhythms is in discerning the change of intensity of sound, as when there is “rising energy” as our speech arrives at a vowel. Note that this is exactly the kind of rising energy we need to hear when musicians play pickup notes that lead into a beat. And the beat note in a song is always placed on a vowel, as it is in speech.

Next week, we’ll discuss the importance of pickup notes in playing music. They prepare us for each beat, and compel our interest as we track the melodies we listen to. Sadly, dyslexia seems to blur the perception of this change in emphasis, at least when it comes to speech.

One of the treatments for this problem is the use of rhythm connected to words — marching, singing, active physical engagement. Rhythm is something we hear, feel and even see (rhythm in visual art is a whole topic unto itself). Making it physical helps us focus.

Dyslexia appears to be hereditary, and can show up in a spectrum ranging from mild to strong. Researchers have been able to notice the problem even in babies, and certain indications by age 2 even allow them to make predictions about a person’s future vocabulary.

Given the new treatments for dyslexia using physical movement, I wonder whether musicians with persistent rhythm problems could also be helped by simple physical treatments. This may explain why the two students that I mention in my earlier article “Rhythm Tales” were helped by practicing the cross-crawling they’d never learned as toddlers.

I guess I was onto something when I asked those Yale researchers about the impact of dyslexia on music, but never imagined that the connection would be found in the perception of beats and changes in rhythmic energy. We were always told that disability was about mixing up the order of letters, numbers, or words, but that apparently is a mere symptom.

The encouraging thing is that most people do not have this disability, and those who do may have a very mild case that they can overcome in order to be completely functional. Happily, the work of Prof. Goswami and many others appears to make it easier to predict and treat the problem, whether in children or adults.

If you’d like to hear the whole podcast interview, you’ll find it at this link.