I can’t prove it right now, but I’m more and more thinking that Charlie may well have perfect pitch.

Though without a piano or cello teacher (I’ve followed a few leads, but with no luck, yet), Charlie has still been practicing, and has often asked to “play cello” in the later afternoon, before he and I go on our usual walk. Last week, after I took the cello out of its case, a few strums on the strings revealed that it was really out tune. As in, really, the D way way too low, the G unidentifiable, the C low, and loose.

With Charlie saying “play cello,” “play cello,” I turned the pegs, just a bit, but with the memory of how I once broke a string on my viola still fresh, I was very hesitant. Charlie kept asking to play and so I brought the cello over to him and opened the music book. “A, D, D, A,” he sang, perfectly in tune—-and the not-tuned cello was distinctly wrong-sounding. Charlie frowned and kept singing out the notes, in tune, before he plucked the flat-sounding strings.

He kept frowning, and singing the notes, and persevered with the plucking. And when he’d finished and I was wiping the rosin off the strings, I told him we’d bring the cello to the music store to get it tuned.

That was over a week ago. Charlie kept asking to play his instrument, most insistently, and so each night I’d try again to tune it, and just hear the C and G and D as they should be (the A was the only sort of tuned string), and then the pegs slipped no matter what I did. After practicing, we’d go for a walk and then when we got back it seemed late and was dark and Charlie wanted dinner. So it wasn’t until yesterday, Thursday that I put the cello in the trunk of the black car and we drove to the music store.

A young man, his hair as close shaven as Charlie’s and a stud in his ear (and about the same height as Charlie) immediately took the cello and starting working on it. Charlie stood at the counter, eyes wide open under the two hoods (sweatshirt + winter coat). The store has several soundproof rooms for lessons off to one side and there were parents and children, and instruments and racks of music books (A Charlie Brown Christmas! the entire Bastien piano series! sheet music for “In My Life”!) everywhere. Charlie briefly raised his voice, then stood with his hands over his ears. Looking in a rack, I found a beginner’s piano book that had some of the same songs that Charlie’s piano teacher had adapted for him to play and it occurred to me, why not have Charlie learn to play these slightly more complicated versions of songs he already knows?

We left the store with a tuned-up cello and Charlie carrying a new piano book. There were Christmas trees for sale across the parking lot and the piney smell was distinct in the cold air. Adolescent girls walked by us with guitar cases and their mothers calling out, and younger siblings trailing.

Charlie hummed “Winter Wonderland,” all the way home, and every note was in its place.

34-year-old Charlene Sawyer has a “rich and dark mezzo soprano voice,” today’s Charlotte Observer notes. Sawyer was not diagnosed with autism until she was 17 years old. She started piano lessons and performing with school choirs at the age of 12, and has been taking voice lessons since she was 14. And

Around this time, she says, her peers made fun of her because they knew she took special education classes. Instead of the socializing she might have enjoyed as a young teen-ager, she immersed herself in her budding gift, learning pieces in Italian, Latin, German and French.

Sawyer has written an outline of her autobiography and now lives in a group home run by the Enola Group, whose director, Fredda Monroe, “says she wants to market Charlene to perform at weddings and to perhaps cut a CD of her singing.”

Heidi Thompson, a friend of Charlene’s who accompanies her to see opera performances in Charlotte and works with her at Studio XI, says Charlene told her she wants to “tell the story of what it’s like to be an artist with a disability.”

“Most autistic people can’t feel or express emotion,” Charlene says. “I do.”

It’s not stated clearly in the Charlotte Observer article: Is it through her singing, through music, that Sawyer is able to “feel” and “express emotion”—usic certainly seems to be such a medium for my son Charlie, from the days when him singing “Frere Jacques” signified that he was upset.

(No, he wasn’t singing that song tonight!)

Sunday I wrote about singer Pip Brown aka Ladyhawke, who has Asperger’s Syndrome; a profile of her in the Independent noted how having Asperger’s is one reason that live shows aren’t the easiest for her.

Another musician, singer Craig Nicholls of The Vines, was diagnosed with Asperger’s four years ago: It’s been reported in Reuters via the Calgary Herald that the band has had to cancel their upcoming shows “due to a deterioration in the mental condition” and the “erratic behavior” of Nicholls. Some news sources refer to him as having a “mental illness” though what he has is Asperger’s syndrome—-the singer was diagnosed with Asperger’s after “abusing fans and assaulting a Sydney photographer.” Asperger’s shouldn’t be conflated with “mental illness”—doing so suggests that someone on the spectrum is “crazy” and that’s not the case—  and hope that Nicholls can get the care he needs.

“Young, gifted, and autistic”: That’s how the November 16th Independent profile describes New Zealand-born singer-songwriter Pip Brown of Ladyhawke:

recently, she revealed to a British newspaper that she has Asperger’s syndrome (a form of autism) which suddenly shifted media interest from her music to her autism………

But it’s not the story that the singer wants to be defined by. “I really regret talking about it,” she says. “There’s a kid with Asperger’s who wrote to me on MySpace, saying I was a liar. It was really hurtful. I was like, you have no idea what I’ve been through. Yeah, I’m a bit weird. I do weird things. I’ve been really wary since then.” Not that it shows. Brown is chatty, warm and sincere; in many ways, the opposite of the autistic stereotype – which goes to show how far the stereotype is from reality, and how far she has come. Slouched on a sofa, she talks breezily, in her thick Kiwi accent, about her overwhelming and exciting year as a rising star.

Brown talks about her trouble in school as a child (”‘I wouldn’t go to school when I was younger, and when I did, I would just stare out the window. I didn’t like anyone touching me and I didn’t like people coming near me’”) and how she started playing piano at 8 and drums at 11 and “‘that was it for me. I loved it,’” as she says.

A couple of years ago—after locking herself in her house for three months—Brown got a diagnosis and felt much relief. It’s noted that live shows still aren’t the easiest for Brown, “partly due to the syndrome, partly due to nerves.”

Music, as I note a lot here, is a big part of Charlie’s and our lives and Pip Brown’s story resonates.

When Charlie was taking piano lessons once a week (from this teacher), he practiced almost every day. In the beginning, when he was just learning to identify the keys and read the notes, practices were 10 to 15 minutes and sometimes less. Charlie’s teacher emphasized that he hoped that Charlie would enjoy playing the piano, and not see it as some chore that he had to do, so we always (well, we always tried) to end on a good note. (I was not trying to pun.)

After about 9 months, when Charlie was clearly learning to read the notes and starting to play with both hands, he often barely had to look at the sheet music to play “Spinning” and “Oh Susanna” and the other short little songs in his book—-it was quite apparent that he’d more or less memorized many of the pieces and looking at the music was just an afterthought. As we practice less now — partially because Charlie’s also got to practice cello and also because he’s not taking piano lessons with a teacher anymore — Charlie has to pause and focus on what the notes say, so in some ways the piano practice has also been a good way to reinforce his reading skills. He can read the treble and bass clefs and a full octave of both starting from middle C.

I started taking piano lessons when I was six years old and played all through high school. I had weekly lessons, daily practice (with summers “off”—there was many a time that I detested nothing so much as practicing the piano), and a few entrances in the tryouts for the Junior Bach Festival in Berkeley. (I never made it past the tryouts; always had a memory block in the middle of the fugue I had so meticulously played a thousand times over.) I also started playing viola in the third grade and played in two youth orchestras.

To be honest, I often wished I had stuck with the violin: Charlie’s hands are already bigger than mine and because I’m 5 feet tall, I couldn’t use a bigger-sized viola that made a bigger, deeper sound. Charlie’s got long, slender fingers. I’ve always had to strain a bit to reach a full octave; Charlie can do this with ease. I figured cello would be a better match for him, plus he wouldn’t have to hold up an instrument on his shoulder. And, he definitely prefers low-pitched and deep sounds, so higher tones and sometimes squeakiness of a violin might not appeal to him at all (and especially as he’s been in a very sound-sensitive phase for the past year).

My goal for the next year is to try to teach Charlie to play sheet music—-to play music from a piano book bought in a store. Right now, we’re still using the songs his old teacher left us with. Those sheets just have the bare essentials on them, the notes of course, the clefs, some rests (though Charlie doesn’t really play them), sharps, maybe a time signature or some slurs. Too many distractions on the page tend to, well, distract; just on Sunday evening, Charlie sight-read a new song which had some measures in which the right and left hands play simultaneously. He paused at those measures and played the right hand part first, and then (following me pointing) the left hand.

And yes, I can’t be more glad that I had to practice piano and viola, every day, for all those years

“Only a Fool,” an online recording posted on MySpace by a friend of the parents of hacker Gary McKinnon, is in the top five of MySpace videos watched——McKinnon allegedly hacked his way into 97 computers belonging to NASA, the Department of Defense and several branches of the military, and is facing, and fighting against, extradition to the US. According to the Scotsman:

Despite struggling from depression, McKinnon posted his self-penned track on MySpace and within 48 hours it had been viewed by more than 100,000 people – taking it to No.5 in the video charts.

McKinnon’s melancholy ballad is a tale of survival in the face of great adversity. The chorus features the lyrics: “Don’t stop, don’t say it don’t matter/If it ain’t easy try harder/Only a fool would let it go/Don’t stop, don’t sit and do nothing/If it ain’t easy say something/Only a fool would let it show.”

The equally downbeat video features youngsters trudging around a bleak inner-city location.

McKinnon could face as much as 60 years in an American prison.

8 to 11 year olds who studied either piano or a string instrument for a minimum of three years outperformed children with no musical training in auditory discrimination, finger dexterity, verbal ability and non-verbal reasoning. Science Daily reports on a study published in the October 29th PLoS One.

Yes, Charlie has been practicing……….

I’ve been teaching some of my Latin students how to scan Latin poetry—-how to figure out the meter by identifying long and short syllables, elisions of vowels, when there’s a pause for a breath (caesura). One student commented that he likes scanning more than translating and it is a different sort of way of dealing with a language, looking at the sounds and syllables of words and not so much their meanings.

I talk about scanning as attending to the music of the poetry, to its sounds, more than to its sense. I’ve often noted that Charlie’s always had an affinity for music. That’s the impetus behind efforts to teach him to play the piano and the cello. While Charlie’s long struggled to learn to read words, he figured out how to read notes and the basics of sheet music (for both instruments) quite easily. He and Jim have an ever-growing repertoire of call and response songs and I’ve often been able to figure out what Charlie is saying (he doesn’t always fully articulate his syllables) by the intonation, pitch, and rhythm of his voice. I’ve also noted that he often seems to figure out what we’re saying based as much on those musical qualities.

The October Scientific American has a brief overview of a Jaunuary letter in Nature, on ultra-fine frequency tuning revealed in single neurons of human auditory cortex. It seems that human’s brains are “wired” to hear fine discriminations of sound, down to the 12th of an octave.

The study revealed that groups of exquisitely sensitive neurons exist along the auditory nerve on its way from the ear to the auditory cortex. In these neurons natural sounds, such as the human voice, elicit a completely different and far more complex set of responses than do artificial noises such as pure tones. In this mixed environ ment humans can easily detect frequencies as fine as one twelfth of an octave—a half step in musical terminology.

The vexing question is: Why? Bats are the only mammal with a better ability to hear changes in pitch than humans do. Predatory species such as dogs are not nearly as sensitive—they can dis criminate resolutions of one third of an octave. Even our primate relatives do not come close: macaques can resolve only half an octave. These results suggest the fine discrimination of sound is not a necessity for survival.

It’s been several months since Charlie had his last piano lesson when his teacher moved away and we don’t practice nearly as much as we used to. Nonetheless, after a little warming up, Charlie’s pretty much back in sync with reading and playing. One of the last things his teacher taught him was to read and play sharps; Charlie caught on easily to this, and often correct himself if he plays a natural note when there’s a sharp, and quickly moves his finger to play the black key a half-step up.

There’s been a lot said and studied about the effects of studying music and playing instruments on children’s learning and intelligence. I don’t have any hard data, but certainly music’s been a key tool for communicating, teaching, and understanding with Charlie, and he with us. I know he can hear a 12th of an octave and this further leads me to note that Charlie hears everything said around him, and that (as we constantly have to remind those who don’t know him) understands most everything he hears. He’s a much better listener than some might think.

(And, perhaps, than many of us who don’t have any “communication disabilities.”)

Coming your way………Causecast, “a powerful online social medium that connects nonprofits, leaders, brands and individuals to those who want to make a positive impact on the world,” according to a press release. Already a Featured Leader is Generation Rescue board member Jenny McCarthy who has “long been a vigilant fighter in the search for a cure for autism”: A year or so is a “long” time?—sorry, being a teacher and translator of Latin and ancient Greek who is married to an American historian, I have a slightly different definition of “long.”

I do know, I’m in it for the long run with Charlie, and autism.

Seems a band called Elbow has won the Nationwide Mercury Prize—-a “staple of UK music accolade-giving since 1992“—-for its album The Seldom Seen Kid. Considering the attention devoted by some “autism activists” (Safe Minds etc.) to the belief that vaccines or something in vaccines, like the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, can be linked to autism, there would indeed be some competition for, I don’t know, “most mad about mercury” and “best talking about detoxing autism.” Jenny McCarthy—now starting up a lifestyle line of non-toxic products—would be a fair contender, as would Evidence of Harm author David Kirby who has again and again “rebranded autism”—-renaming it vaccine-transmitted mercury poisoning or “Environmentally-acquired Neuroimmune Disorder,” to name but two examples—-all while stating that it’s something in the environment behind the epidemic rise in cases of autism, be it vaccines, dental amalgams, or a “Shanghai Plume” of mercury from coal plants built in China that’s wafting across the Pacific Ocean.

Dr. Paul Offit’s recently published book, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure charts the rise and fall of the vaccine/something in vaccine causes autism hypothesis. A growing body of scientific research refutes such a hypothesis, but not before it has stoked so many parental fears that vaccination rates for the MMR have decreased in the UK and that the US has had its largest outbreak of measles. Just last week, a new study disputed a link between the MMR and autism; as more such studies have been published, anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine safety advocates have cried foul and claimed that scientists have “deep ties to Big Pharma”: Rather than weighing the scientific evidence, there’s a tendency among such advocates to cry out “conspiracy!” and talk around what the evidence says.

And, too, they keep digging for connections and links and bits of data that would suggest that, for instance, some of the autistic children described in Leo Kanner’s 1943 article on infantile autism had been exposed to something suspicious, and even toxic, in the environment; a number of articles by journalist Dan Olmsted have claimed such coincidences. The latest such coincidence was described in a September th  of Autism post, in which Olmsted hypothesized that Neurodiversity blogger Kathleen Seidel is literally “toxic,” due to an alleged brush with ethylmercury—an “occupational exposure to chemicals”—that, who knows, “triggered autism” in her……….

This is Dan Olmsted’s hypothesis, though one can’t but help noting that the post’s title, “Is Kathleen Seidel Toxic?”, has at least two meanings. The first meaning is that noted above—-that Seidel is “toxic” (like autistic children who “become” autistic due to mercury poisoning or some such)—-and the second is that she’s “toxic” in a more metaphorical sense, insofar as her extremely-well-researched and thought-out posts on Neurodiversity have exposed the anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine-safety advocates to some trenchant scrutiny. Seidel is also featured in Dr. Offit’s new book, and was featured as well in a New York magazine article on neurodiversity. She’s indeed been rather “toxic” (in a figurative sense) to the vaccine-autism hypothesis, and to the purveyors of a number of biomedcal and alternative, and often experimental, treatments for autism; Seidel has strongly objected to the detrimental effects of calling autistic persons “trainwrecks” or “poisoned” or “tragedies.” (And here’s more about toxicity.)

Seidel’s scrutiny of vaccine litigation and alternative treatments for autism is much-needed. Of course, families will choose the treatments that they discern are best for their child, but it’s not so easy to evaluate claims of what works and what does not, and when a quack is quacking. Take something as apparently innocuous as organic food: Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) indeed suggests that “considering and going organic is another important step in this process for better eating, health, and digestion.” Then one reads history professor James E. McWilliams in the September 8th Slate about how organic agriculture might be polluting food with heavy metals:

Scientists have known since the 1920s that organic fertilizers used by farmers to supplement conventional systems—composted animal manure, rock phosphates, fish emulsions, guano, wood ashes, etc.—further contaminate topsoil with varying concentrations of heavy metals. Organic advocates, who rely exclusively on these fertilizers, remain well aware of the problem today, although they rarely publicize the point.

No one is saying that organic soil has higher heavy-metal counts than conventional soil as a rule—scientists have not conducted enough research to make such a determination. Still, some evidence indicates that organic soil can, in some cases, be more contaminated. George Kuepper, an agriculture specialist with the National Center for Appropriate Technology, observed in a 2003 report that composting manure actually concentrates the fertilizer’s metal content, which could lead to greater levels of the contaminants in organic soil.

So even while, as TACA says, “these [organic] foods do not contain nasty chemicals added during the growing process,” something—even “heavy metals” of the type some talk about “detoxifying” a child of—may still be present in organic food (which maybe is not exactly “better” for us). There’s more than meets the eye, and the label.

When the talk is about autism, there’s been enough time devoted to arguing for and refuting hypotheses of vaccines as linked to autism. Dr. Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets traces the history of this hypothesis, now in decline. What is not, of course, in decline is the number of children and adults diagnosed with autism. Understanding and awareness of autism—what it is, how to teach autistic persons—have also been growing in the past decade. These are growth trends that are not about to stop, and we need to keep calling for more and better educational supports and services, for schools and schools programs, for job-training, actual jobs, actual housing, and many other services and suports for autistic person, throughout their lifespan.

You’ve got a chance to say what you think about autism services to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC): Send in comments about autism services by September 19, and send in comments about the draft of the Strategic Plan for ASD Research by September 30. Sullivan on Left Brain/Right Brain has also taken a closer look at the Strategic Plan (which you can see here).

We don’t want our kids to be the losers in the vaccine-autism debate, but they and we can lose out on a lot if so much attention remains fixated on this one hypothetical cause of autism. I could care less about taking home any awards, but I’m not interested in my son being a loser when so much is at stake—-and yes, I’ll keep on talking.