Creating a virtual heart: Arts practice with a defective mind

Abstract

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Creating a Virtual Heart uses an interdisciplinary lens to explore music making from the point of view of a person with Asperger's Syndrome, a pervasive developmental disorder on the Autism Spectrum, and conversely provides a musician's view of Asperger's Syndrome, through new forms of methodology for conducting and presenting research in the creative arts. Autoethnography, systematic self-observation, surveys and interviews are used to explore the ways in which the heightened autistic traits of the condition impact upon the author's practice, in musical and social terms. Autistic traits that impact on creative practice include impairments in empathy, Theory of Mind and emotional response to music, sensory anomalies and increased local coherence. These traits affect the author’s creative process in composition through an enhanced interest in detail versus gestalt, the inclusion of unusual auditory experiences and the means of embedding affect within the music. Collaborative work is examined in terms of communication and understanding between members of creative teams, including verbal and non-verbal language and empathic responses. The study documents an internal perspective on two very personal, and almost inseparable themes. By their very nature these themes are strongly loaded with subjectivity, bias and very personal experience. The resulting analysis of this affects first, foremost and strongest, the researcher himself and offers a window through which the reader may glimpse another reality.