The Impact of Rhythmic Entrainment on a Person with Autism

ne of the defining characteris-tics of persons with autism is a sensory impairment that is often auditory based. Parents often re-port that their children with autism react to individual sounds differently. A child may not respond to his or her name being called or may not show a startle re-sponse to a loud noise, yet he or she may become agitated by the ticking of a clock (Ritvo, Ornitz, & LaFranchi, 1968; Schreibman, 1988). Because of this deficit, researchers have begun to investigate the impact of sensory-based interventions on children and youth with autism (Hoffman, 1995; Strong, 1995). One method, rhythmic entrainment, uses music to aid in relax-ation by introducing externally produced rhythms that are specifically designed to re-entrain the body to its natural rhyth-mic patterns (Ostrander, Schroeder, & Ostrander, 1994; Strong, 1995). The tempo of "metered music" used to ac-complish this pattern is 50 to 65 beats per minute, which is the range that mir-rors the average number of beats per minute of a relaxed heartbeat (Hoffman, 1995). According to Hoffman (1995), metered music is effective because en-trainment does not require stimulus-response or action-reaction processing. Although some research supports the use of entrainment for students with autism and other disabilities (Hoffman, 1995; Strong, 1995), the majority of in-formation on this topic is not empirically based. This study was to extend the lim-ited research base on rhythmic entrain-ment by measuring the impact of this intervention on a female youth with autism.