A few years ago, I wrote a profile of local comedian/musician/impresario Chas Roberts. During our interview, he talked about how he has a stutter in normal, everyday conversation, but it disappears when he performs as a character:

Normally, Roberts has a stutter—he elongates some vowels, like the e and the a in “regurgitation”—but it disappears when he’s being Jackson Lowe. Something about the character, he says, frees up the traffic jam in his synapses and banishes the stutter. “It’s even more gone when I sing,” he says. “I tried to sing in monotone for a few weeks when I was around 19. I was the hit of some parties.”

This morning, he sent me a link to an NPR story about melodic intonation therapy—or “singing therapy”—for people whose language centers have been blown apart by strokes or accidents. (Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has used singing therapy after her would-be assassin shot a bullet through the speech center in the left side of her brain.)

It’s fascinating stuff:

For more than 100 years, it’s been known that people who can’t speak after injury to the speech centers on the left side of the brain can sing… When NPR sat in on one of her therapy sessions recently, Meyerson still struggled to speak even the simplest phrases. But she’s beginning to talk again.

“If you go to a restaurant and the server asks if you’d like something before your main dish, you might choose something like this,” therapist Andrea Norton says, showing Meyerson a picture of a salad. Then Norton sings the word “salad,” intoning the syllables on a minor third – the tune every child knows from the taunt “nyah-nyah! nyah-nyah!”

Read the whole thing here.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

5 replies on “Aphasia, the Brain, and “Singing Therapy””

  2. I’ve also heard speaking in unison with another person’s voice can be helpful. Some people have found that a hearing aid that simply echoes their own voice into their ear simulates that experience.

  3. Quite a few well-known people are (or were) stutterers. I immediately thought of country music legend Mel Tillis, who would often show up on talk shows back in the day, hardly able to get a word out … until he starting singing his latest song.

    But Tillis is hardly the only entertainer who’ll admit to it. Among them, amazingly, is James Earl Jones.

  4. Is it wrong that the first thing to come to mind was A Fish Called Wanda, when John Cleese tries to get Michael Palin to say Cathcart Towers, and finally gets him to sing it? After he takes the french fries out of his nose, of course.

  5. I have a panic disorder that sometimes manifests itself in an inability to speak, but I can still sing. It’s super strange, but it works. (it also feels ridiculous, which helps to lessen the panic altogether)

    I first tried it after observing a music therapist work with nonverbal kids by getting them to sing.

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