Joined: 26 Feb 2018 Age: 28 Gender: Male Posts: 17 Location: Pennsylvania
04 Jun 2018, 5:59 pm
In my opinion, this is a defenitely an autism thing, but you have to keep in mind the spectrum nature of autism meaning other autistics may not experience this.
I have different "modes" of interpreting the world- the one I usually stay in anymore makes it easy for me to process language because it's so important in my life anymore... and people think I'm stupid if I'm in a mode that makes it hard or near impossible for me to process language. Unfortunately, I don't get into music nearly as much as I used to. (I think I used to stim pretty hard on music and "travel".) Whenever I was in a music mode, I didn't get the words.
Freakishly, when I was a young kid, I didn't realize right away that all songs had words. I heard people "singing"- which would always annoy the crap out of me because I couldn't listen to the song. I also didn't know where the words were coming from and was in denial when I began to realize that those words were actually also being sung by the singer.
I also have a CAPD, of course. I also delve into music pretty deeply of course. I used to make music in my head and would run around the house crazily dancing and moving with my music. (My family said this was called "having a song in your head" but I experience that too and it was not at all the same.)
Did you know there is a spectrum of perfect pitch? People talk about how autism is a spectrum but realistically most things in psychology are a spectrum. I read somewhere that surprisingly near 100% of autistics are on the perfect pitch spectrum, meaning they have the ability to develop some sort of perfect pitch. They then went into the weak central coherence theory but as a whole it just shows how differently different people can process things.
I can pick up the words after hearing a song a few times but I can't make sense of any of them. It's like I hear each word separately instead of my mind stringing them together into anything meaningful. I believe my own problem is an auditory processing issue as I always have issues when anyone is speaking in a rhythmic style. I recently saw Cornel West speak and I couldn't make sense of almost anything he was saying. I was just picking up individual words and nothing else.
Joined: 24 Jun 2017 Age: 39 Gender: Male Posts: 571 Location: MI, USA
04 Jun 2018, 7:42 pm
I have this problem! It is not uniquely an issue with songs, though. I sometimes cannot follow whole chunks of a film or a show, because my mind seems to blend out certain letters. I always thought of it as being part of my ADHD, but, after what i am reading here, it feels like there could be more to it.
_________________ I am a Michael Keaton lookalike, apparently
Joined: 22 Jul 2014 Age: 26 Gender: Male Posts: 126 Location: Near Pittsburgh PA
05 Jun 2018, 2:26 pm
Yes. Just about every song I listen to I seem to have trouble hearing specific words. The words that I hear may sound jibberish unless I look up the lyrics if the song itself is good enough.