By May Blue
As a music listener, I feel that music is almost always written without the consideration of neurodivergent people. As a music artist, I know that music is almost always written without the consideration of neurodivergent people.
Here is a music industry secret:
Men in suits; the label people who are deciding what music is allowed to be released, have been talking a lot recently about how ‘attention spans are becoming shorter’ & how the most important thing for success right now is landing on playlists with sounds that grab attention immediately. They are prioritising repeated sounds that border on irritating, and very fast rhythms.
For neurotypical people, it’s just the sound of 2020’s music.
For neurodivergent people like myself, it’s the sound of an imminent meltdown.
I am going to assume, dear reader, that you are as nerdy as I am, and I will explain to you the lessons I have learned around creating music for neurodivergent people like us.
LYRICS
I have given myself permission to bring my autistic view of relationships into my songs lyrically.
While most people understand relationships emotionally, as an autistic person, I understand them logically. Tools, like research studies, help me to understand relationships. In my song If It’s Not Love, I sing, “I read a study, it says that hormones go up and down all the time.”
There are enough songs written for the masses. I love being niche.
FREQUENCY
Frequency is essentially pitch. Studies cite that sounds between 2k-5k Hz are especially jarring. Personally, I find 3k-3.5k especially irritating. From an evolutionary perspective, crying babies & animal scratching noises fall within this range. Women are extra sensitive to this range.
Less than 2% of audio engineers are female.
An EQ is a tool used in the mixing & mastering process that can minimise these sounds. An easier step I take is avoiding them almost entirely, at the production stage.
TIMBRE
Timbre, also called ‘tone colour’, is essentially the adjectives you would use to describe a sound. Words like ‘woody & metallic’ describe the timbre of a sound.
I have found that sounds that are tinny, sharp, metallic & scratchy are extra irritating. Noises that are buzzy or beeping also drive me wild. I produce around half of all my songs independently because I have a hard time finding producers who don’t reach for these sounds. Hi hats on drums are an especially bad offender.
RHYTHM
What’s worse than a high pitched, screechy sound? A REPEATED high pitched screechy sound. Repeated rhythms in general can be very grating.
In all my music, I prioritise contrast, especially in the lower rhythmic sections. Studies have also shown that repetition in very low sounds can be unsettling.
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As an autistic person myself & with a largely autistic community online, I have found myself in a unique position to experiment with new techniques that can make music more suitable to neurodivergent people, beyond the existing research. One of the most interesting discoveries I have made is that autistic people LOVE to repeat the same song. Sometimes for hours. (Myself included!) So I experimented with a structure that has no clear verse or chorus. There isn’t a lot of contrast throughout the song. This makes it AMAZING to play on repeat. The song is called Shadows by May Blue, that’s me, if you’re interested in hearing a practical
example of what it sounds like.
This lack of structure has been very polarising among listeners. While editors and writers at Billboard and Rolling Stone have praised its innovation, and my autistic community has loved it, I found that many neurotypical people find it frustrating and unpredictable. They also complain that it is not ‘commercial’ (meaning, they think it won’t make money or have mass appeal) which honestly feels like a compliment, even when they don’t intend it that way.
Another thing I experimented with in my song Shadows is having lyrics that hardly make sense. This makes it possible to listen to the song on repeat while reading a book or writing, without it becoming distracting. I wanted the song to serve as an alternative to white noise for adults, in a format that has similar uses to white noise, but feels much more like listening to pop music.
Lyrically in this song, I prioritised almost entirely words with very long vowel sounds and minimal consonant sounds. I have found consonant sounds, like sharp S and T sounds, can be unpleasant, while long vowel sounds are very soothing. To me, long vowel sounds sound much more like the rumble of the ocean or a steady strumming of a heartbeat.
The challenge is that in removing all these elements that aren’t autism and ADHD friendly, I have removed a lot of what makes a modern song traditionally interesting. While people who have tried to create music eliminating the above elements have hit a wall here, I actually found a lot of joy in the space left in the production for me to experiment.
I read an interesting study about how women especially can find unsettling or spooky sounds rather sexy. In my song, Shadows, I used an entirely new technique. I recorded 2 lead vocals and& panned them hard left & right.
Explaining this; modern music exists in a stereo format, meaning the sounds are placed on a left, centre & right plane. Vocals are always placed in the centre. Harmonies are placed in the centre & softer than the lead. Sometimes ‘doubles’ are recorded, which are the same as the lead, just softer. These are placed quietly, a little to the left and right, but never without the lead in the centre as the loudest vocal.
Except in Shadows, I didn’t place a vocal in the centre at all. The vocal comes at you from the extreme left & right. It is unsettling & hard to place. I wanted it to feel like a sexy supernatural show (similar to The Vampire Diaries, which I am currently watching). It feels like the vocal is coming at you from everywhere, yet nowhere.
As an autistic person, having ‘voices all around me’ is usually unbearable. Yet in this song, with everything lining up so perfectly, it was just right. It is actually very healing for me, being able to tolerate voices all around me for the first time and finding it soothing.
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Now, as an autistic person, I have never liked writing ‘conclusions’. I have said what I wanted to say. Conclusions, to me, feel like masking; a social necessity to make what I have to say more palatable.
That said, if you are a neurodivergent person looking for sensory-friendly music to add to add to your playlists, please do find me on your streaming platform by
searching ‘May Blue’. I would recommend starting with Shadows, Private & If It’s Not Love.
Thank you for reading <3
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May Blue is an Australian alternative jazz artist, composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist whose music exists at the intersection of emotional honesty and musical craftsmanship. Blending jazz harmony with the intimacy of contemporary pop, she creates songs that feel both sophisticated and deeply human music that invites listeners in rather than asking them to understand jazz before they can love it.
Driven by a fascination with the relationship between sound and emotion, May spent years exploring how musical frequencies, instrumentation, and arrangement shape the way we experience music. The result is a distinctive artistic voice known for its warmth, restraint, and accessibility, resonating with listeners across generations, including those with anxiety, autism, and sensory sensitivities. A multi-instrumentalist with a background spanning vocals, piano, guitar, clarinet, flute, violin, saxophone, and marimba, May brings a broad and deeply developed musical perspective to her work as a composer, songwriter, and producer.
Her critically acclaimed debut album, Vanilla, was created in collaboration with legendary producer and mixer Ken Lewis, whose credits include the debut albums of Lana Del Rey and Lorde, as well as Taylor Swift’s Midnights and Lover. The album was mastered by Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer Dale Becker, whose credits include Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and Doja Cat. May has also written three Billboard-charting songs as a songwriter and delivered a successful headline concert in Sydney celebrating Vanilla.
Praised by Ricardo Durán, Editor in Chief of Rolling Stone, for her “enormous potential” and “authentic and personal identity and sound,” May is building an increasingly international audience, with more than 70,000 followers across social platforms, predominantly women in Australia, the US, and the UK. With three pending nominations for the 2026 ARIA Awards and a growing body of work that moves freely between jazz and contemporary pop, May is quietly redefining what alternative jazz can feel like—creating music that is intimate, emotionally generous, and quietly unforgettable.
