Ok, that's not entirely true....I can now play the piano with my left hand by ear, but it takes considerably more effort and is slower (I am assuming due to processing speed). However, my daughter just started piano lessons. The teacher knows we both have ASD and learn differently so she started her out playing by ear....which worked beautifully until she tried to get her to play by ear with her left hand. We tried out a couple different scenarios with me (since my daughter is like my mini-me), and we discovered that I could play by ear with my left hand so long as I was playing the same exact pattern with my right hand (because I am focusing on my right hand and just moving my left hand to match the pattern...it doesn't matter which fingers, direction, or even if the notes are correct so long as it is the same pattern). I did a little research, and the only thing I could come up with was that analyzing music so that you can play by ear may be more of a "left-brain" function (to over simplify it) and since my daughter and I (like most people with ASD I've met) are very strongly "right-brained"....maybe our left-brains are so overtaxed with trying to play by ear that it is not communicating well with the right side of our brain (which more or less controls left hand movements).
Anyone else have this problem?!?!? The teacher (a friend of mine) was actually pretty brilliant, and after watching me play decided that we would just have her play the same pattern with both hands for a while.
18 Oct 2015, 1:22 am
