The Meaning of Music for Visually Impaired People
The image shows: A man singing in to a microphone playing an electronic keyboard with disco lights in the background.
The Marvel superhero Daredevil was blinded in a childhood car accident. His super-human, crime-fighting abilities derive from a heightening of his other senses. Daredevil is a caricature of the now well-evidenced claim that visual impairment enhances other senses, particularly hearing. It was widely assumed that this improvement was the result of learned behaviour, but research in the last decade has shown that this results from a process of “cross-modal neuroplasticity”. This describes a process in which the brain reorganises itself to support other senses when it is deprived of input to another sense. Whilst it’s unlikely that people will gain superpowers from visual impairment, can their heightened senses give them an advantage?
The singers Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Andrea Bocelli, and the pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii – all born with visual impairment – are examples of blind people with exceptional musical talent, and there are many more examples! But does their visual impairment have anything to do with their talent?
In 2010, Professor Adam Ockelford conducted a study which found that prematurely born, visually impaired children are 4000 times more likely to have perfect pitch than fully sighted peers! What makes this so remarkable is that only 20% of musicians and 1 in 10,000 of the wider population have perfect pitch. Perfect pitch refers to the ability of a person to identify a musical note by its sound. This is useful because it enables a quicker, deeper understanding of musical theory that can encourage creative expression when composing and improvising. People with this ability often describe it as a way of hearing the “colour” of the sound. So, it is also a unique way of seeing and feeling.
Hearing is an important sense for visually impaired people as it can help them navigate the world independently, it can also form the basis of some assistive technology – like text-to-speech technology or audio description. With music, it becomes important for different reasons. It enables self-expression, has therapeutic effects, and can even act as an interpersonal and communal tool. A 2015 study in the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness found that music was involved in the majority of leisure activities of visually impaired participants. The researchers also found that visually impaired participants primarily used music for self-amusement. They concluded that the role of music in visually impaired people’s lives should be expanded to provide “more group opportunities, hands-on experiences, enjoyable outdoor activities, and psychosocial coping strategies.”
The therapeutic and communal potential of music, paired with the likelihood that visually impaired children will be more talented, Ockelford concluded, means that more should be done to teach music to visually impaired children, and we couldn’t agree more!