Spin the Spectrum utilizes music as a medium for the neurodiverse

DALLAS — Watch the full story when it airs tonight on WFAA News at 10.

Jason Straughter has music operating by his veins. 

The DJ, who works beneath the identify of Jay*Clipp, says that, at given any second of the day, he is both listening to music or making it.

“Music is life to me,” he says. 

Jay*Clipp has been a skilled DJ since 1996. And he is acquired some notable skins on the wall in that world, too, having traveled round the world  and carried out gigs alongside the likes of Erykah Badu, Jay-Z, Dave Chappelle, and Spinderella.

But, regardless of all that star energy, Jay*Clipp says the work he is been placing in the previous couple of years with a pal of his simply could be the most fulfilling factor he is ever carried out in his profession.

That pal, Courtney Willis, is not a performer in any respect. Rather, she’s a speech language pathologist. And she’s been spinning round a concept of her personal of late — that music and language are parallel to one another, and that they activate the mind in optimistic methods.

That concept got here to Willis when she, Jay*Clipp and a few others traveled with a nonprofit to Lagos, Nigeria, in 2013 for World Autism Day. The work they did there spawned their need to do comparable work right here their dwelling nation, and particularly so of their dwelling metropolis of Dallas.

“[We thought] let’s see if there’s a way we can merge what you do and what I do into something cool,” says Jay*Clipp, who had already launched a DJ faculty right here in North Texas referred to as the Keep Spinning DJ Academy.

Now, he and Willis run a nonprofit offshoot of the Keep Spinning DJ Academy referred to as Spin the Spectrum that, per its web site, goals to offer “inclusive DJ education, camps and classes aimed at teaching marketable skills to increase opportunities for employment and inclusion in neurotypical society.”

Through Spin the Spectrum, the pair works with round 12 college students two days a week. They sit in on the one-hour periods collectively, using each of their know-hows to tailor their courses to every particular person scholar.

“If you’ve seen one person on the spectrum you’ve seen… one person on the spectrum,” says Willis.  

For Jay*Clipp and Willis, the alternative to work with neurodiverse college students is a particular deal with. Willis tells WFAA that, for kids who use their brains in a different way the patterns, the twists and the turns that come up in the songs they be taught to control by turntables could be a soothing factor. Having management of the turntables, in the meantime, could be liberating.

“There was just one session where we just wept the whole session,” says Willis. 

“To see it actually unfolding, I was like., ‘Wow, it just blew me away!'” says Jay*Clipp.

Their not the solely ones whose worldviews are being modified by Spin the Spectrum’s choices.

Jonathan Carter has been bringing his son Sam to the faculty for periods for a whereas now. 

“He listens to music all day long,” Carter says of a technique during which the courses have modified his son. 

But there have been different breakthroughs from this remedy as properly. 

Sam, like his fellow college students, processes the world in a different way than most. His dad says that, earlier than coming to Spin the Spectrum, Sam used to solely talk when prompted. These days, he texts his mother and father full messages utilizing lyrics and timestamps from  songs which might be applicable to the conversations. 

“He’s finding moments in the songs,” Carter says. “He’s telling us [that] he can start sharing things with us.”

Receiving these messages was a main second for the Carters — they usually’re all grateful for the hour-long courses throughout which Sam will get to work the turntables alongside Jay*Clipp and Willis .

But how Sam experiences Spin the Spectrum is not essentially the means others would possibly. Each class is completely different. Sometimes the college students come to the periods ready with the songs they need to manipulate. Other occasions, they simply go together with no matter beat Jay*Clipp serves up.

The one fixed in the courses right here — as in Jay*Clipp’s life, too — is music.

“A beat is a predictable routine,” Willis says. “Any time you create a predictable routine, you decrease the cognitive load being placed on your brain.”

Soon, Willis hopes to search out a tutorial group to check what’s occurring in Spin the Spectrum’s periods. Because she believes one thing particular is going on in these intimate periods.  

In the meantime, although, she and Jay*Clipp are loads happy with the developments they’re seeing firsthand — the exceptional development that the lecturers, mother and father and college students concerned can all see, as properly as hear.

It’s that a part of what Spin the Spectrum does that is music to everybody’s ears.

Says Willis: “You get the opportunity to be somebody’s very first friend most of the time.”