Can music help overcome stuttering?
Billboard topping musician Ed Sheeran shared his childhood struggle with stuttering at the American Institute for Stuttering’s Free Voices Changing Lives Benefit Gala in New York City earlier this summer.
The institute honored Sheeran at the event, and he credited Grammy winning rapper Eminem for helping him conquer stuttering. When he was 9-years-old, Sheeran learned the words to every song on Eminem’s CD “Marshall Mathers.”
“He raps very fast and very melodically and very percussively and it helped me get rid of the stutter,” Sheeran said during the event.
Stuttering is a speech disorder that involves problems with the flow of speech. It is characterized by repetition of words or parts of words, as well as prolongations of speech sounds.
“Most existing treatments have focused on teaching individuals ways to produce more fluent speech through a speech therapist,” says Lori Gorecki, speech/language pathologist at Advocate South Suburban Hospital in Hazel Crest, Ill.
Singing has been identified as having important therapeutic potential, and research has provided evidence in favor of this approach for enhancing fluency among individuals who stutter.
“I would find rapping very similar to singing in the aspects of having a fluency component and the familiarity of memorizing lyrics to be helpful as well,” says Gorecki.
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health enews staff is a group of experienced writers from our Advocate Health Care and Aurora Health Care sites, which also includes freelance or intern writers.
I offer the name Mel Tillis, who as a well known country & western singer had a very pronounced stutter, until he sang. Then he was as smooth as there was in country and western.
I had a haircut client, several years older than me and related to my ex husband. I was told he could barely speak for stuttering and his first haircut from me was a turn around for him. I just spoke calmly to him as I think I always have everyone. I was sincerely interested in what he had to say, as I normally am with everyone. In maybe 5 minutes he barely had a stutter. By the end of haircut he had none. Once with others it came back . But not when around and speaking to me. …. just ignore something like that with anyone and have compassion. Treat people as you would want to be treated yourself. I love those most who need it most….and those who sincerely care for others. Just my experience with one who normally stuttered.
Listening to loud music with your headphones on actually helps to fight against anxiety and stuttering, but not way too loud to damage your hearing. There is a ton of video evidence on YouTube showing that music is also extremely effective against stuttering. There was an 11 year old boy named ‘Musharaf Asghar’, who had an extremely severe stutter/stammer. He couldn’t even say a single word until his teacher Matthew Burton decided to help him overcome his stutter. Musharaf started to listen to music with headphones on and began reading a poem. He was finally able to speak much more fluently without stuttering because he could not hear himself speaking. If you are a stutterer and you try to speak while listening to music with your headphones on at the same time, the brain focuses on the music more often than your speech because it does not know that you are actually speaking. The brain also cannot detect the speech and causes it to forget about the stuttering. If you cannot hear yourself stuttering, you would not even stutter at all. Music was never thought to be effective against stuttering/stammering until it was tested on a person who had a speech impediment. Research even shows strong evidence that music can also fight anxiety, therefore it can also help to defeat the stuttering problem too. It has been proven to combat against stuttering for billions of times. Imagine this, stutterers do not stutter at all when they sing, right? The answer is quite true, that is because they use the right side of the brain and it is also known as ‘Easy onset speech’. If they do not stutter when they sing, this truly means that music can help to increase speech fluency. When listening to music with headphones on, the brain is distracted away from the stuttering, making the stuttering person feel much more confident and speak more fluently. Music has also been proven to be able to fight against stress as well.
I am a stuttering since child old till now in the age of 39