“Low pitched notes really make me feel like love might be truly possible. High pitched notes make me feel like I could go crazy with pain and sadness. Great rhythms can make me feel like life is freedom.”
By Jeremy Sicile-Kira
Music makes my life feel normal sometimes because it is such a universal language. It is the way I tend to sync my mind with my body. It is such a strong package of feelings that are involved with every note, and I’m sure that I’m not the only one who feels that way about it. When I hear music I feel a roller coaster of emotions. I think that it is capable of making you feel things you haven’t even felt before in your life. Music can make anyone feel like they are in love or like they are brokenhearted. If we were all to relate love to a song, I am sure every human would have a song picked out – no matter what culture or religion or belief.
Different notes can make me feel different emotions. Low pitched notes really make me feel like love might be truly possible. High-pitched notes make me feel like I could go crazy with pain and sadness. Great rhythms can make me feel like life is freedom. The music that people dance salsa to has a great rhythm. When I listen to salsa, I am just really thinking about how the sounds are making mischief on my soul. Good harmony is like a sweet girlfriend. Vibrations make me think of colors that feel friendly. Great guitar music can really get my very best attention because it pulls on my heart strings. Hearing just a guitar makes me feel like I am getting a call from a lover; I feel in love and I am happy. The frankly great vibrations of the drum can make me feel unusually strong. Loud music gives me the feeling of anger.
I have great respect for singers who can make me get teary-eyed over a story. The song “You and Me Together ” by Dave Matthews Band makes me feel the lyrics as if I were feeling every word was a happy beat in my heart. It inspires me to live life as fully as if I didn’t have autism. The song “Blue You” by Dave Matthews makes me crave to be in love. Jason Mraz’s song “I’m Yours” makes me feel happy inside and cherish all the people in my life. Because music makes me feel emotional, it is like being with a friend.
Good music makes a big difference in my life. The most important thing it does is help me to sequence, meaning it helps me to know the order of steps in any physical action. Things like the steps of a task, the right way to move my body, and how quickly I react rests on the rhythms I feel Music can remind me to get sequences correct. Listening to music while writing makes the flow better between my brain and my body. I truly think that music preserves my sanity because it keeps me in rhythm.
Once a week I have a Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT) session. NMT is the therapeutic application of music to cognitive, sensory, and motor dysfunctions due to neurologic disease of the human nervous system, and this helps my brain organize the different parts of my body (ie, upper, lower, arms, legs). The importance of NMT for me is that the different parts of my whole body frankly behave like they are separate, and the different parts seem to need to listen to the same beat to be able to move together like other people’s bodies do. The NMT therapist helps me find my inner cadence.
I truly believe that great music needs to be evenly balanced to keep my interest. Evenly balanced music is composed of great rhythm, lots of guitar and drum beats, and hardly any high pitched notes. Really the best music is very kind to the ears, just being present but not intruding upon your thoughts.
Jeremy’s bio:
Jeremy Sicile-Kira is an award-winning intuitive artist with autism who communicates by typing. Jeremy is a synesthete – He hears music as emotions, and he sees emotion in color. In 2012, Jeremy began to paint his dreams: dreams that he was painting the emotions of people into colorful abstract portraits. In 2016, his first curated solo art show held in San Diego was covered by local and national media, resulting in a sold-out show. Currently, Jeremy meets clients at his art studio at Space4Art, or via Skype, and paints their portraits by reading their emotions. Jeremy explains, “My ability to paint the colors I see in my dreams is the greatest gift I have. I truly only paint a person’s joyful colors. I nicely believe if I capture their greatly happy colors into a portrait of their true self that they can look at every day, they will behave as great beautiful beings.” For more information, go to Jeremy’sVision.com. Jeremy is passionate about helping others and gives presentations at local schools to encourage students to be the best they can.
Jeremy Sicile-Kira will be part of the upcoming Mainly Mozart Genius Weekend. He will be painting live at a Mainly Mozart Genius Showcase with the Art of Autism on June 8, and The Sparks Gallery will be displaying art by Nobel Laureate Dr. Roger Guillemin and Jeremy at the Genius After party, June 9, starting at 9:30 pm, hosted by Nobel Laureate Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn.
Excellent article written by a fellow artist! I listened to a CBC Ideas episode on Claude Dubussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and I love meditating on the beauty and emotions of the music. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/nine-minutes-that-changed-the-world-1.4138404
Dear Jeremy Sicile-Kira and others,
I was highly touched and moved by your vivid descriptions, which do resonate to some extent with my own experience. I am currently writing a book named “Symphony for Buddha, Science, and Freedom” while living for a dedicated period in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India. The book describes the whole life of Siddhartha who became the Buddha from being a baby till death. In my book Siddhartha is on the spectrum, and my whole personal life from infancy till today are between the lines. The book is very loyal to all known historical fact as I often check it, but is actually based on dreams and visions which arise to me in perfect sync with the story as I write it. I go to sleep and wake at any hour – sometimes I wake to see the sunset and write the whole night and then sleeps and have more dreams. I sleep when I feel the dreams will be coming, and wake after having them in the required amount to continue writing, letting my body fully decide on it. Upon waking, I write the dreams to remember which feeds my daily writing. The word Symphony in the book name stands for the music which I experience combines the parts to a whole and gives it its “right sequence” as you named it. When I started to write the book, the paragraphs felt unconnected, but from the moment I realized that it is a “symphony”, the right integration just happened.
Love,
David Goren