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IJMSTA - Vol. 8 - Issue 2 - July 2026
ISSN 2612-2146
Pages: 16
Prosody, Feedback, and Access to Musical Expressivity for Students on the Autism Spectrum: An Acoustic-Pedagogical Protocol for Higher Music Education with Praat and AI
Authors: Paola Dato
Categories: Journal
Abstract - A prospective protocol for the higher music education of students on the autism spectrum is derived from real pedagogical situations reformulated in anonymised and composite form. The proposal is organised around the relationship between prosody, musical expressivity, and the predictability of feedback. Its theoretical premise is that a substantial part of performance pedagogy still relies on instructions of high metaphorical density - 'more intention', 'less rigidity', 'more emotion' - whose effectiveness presupposes pragmatic, inferential, and imitative competences that are not evenly distributed among students. Such instructions are therefore reconceived within a device of expressive parametrisation, in which fundamental frequency, dynamic range, duration, pauses, articulation, accent, and response to feedback become observable, discussable, and progressively governable objects. The intervention is configured as a twelve-week protocol, replicable through a multiple-baseline design across participants and tasks, with phases of baseline, prosodic training, transfer to repertoire, and maintenance verification. The operational Speech-Song-Speech model uses the movement from intentional spoken language to singing and back to speech as a pedagogical threshold between verbal communication and musical form. Acoustic measures, to be carried out with Praat, are not presented as already obtained results, but as procedures for future empirical validation: intervallic range of the fundamental frequency in semitones, variability of the fundamental frequency, dynamic range, phrase duration, location of pauses, and indicators of agogic variability. AI is integrated as an infrastructure supporting segmentation, visualisation, controlled generation of examples, and metacognition, while remaining excluded from any diagnostic, autonomous evaluative, or normalising function. The result is a transferable model of music-pedagogical research in which acoustic rigour, neurodiversity-affirming ethics, technological prudence, and the performative specificity of higher music education converge within the same pedagogical architecture.
Keywords: AI, Autism spectrum disorder,
Higher music education,
Inclusive higher education,
Neurodiversity,
Performance pedagogy,
Praat,
Prosody
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