Saylist: playlists for young people with speech and sound disorders

Music is said to soften manners and bring comfort. It would calm the pain, help pregnant women to give birth, or even allow tensions to be released. If many virtues are attributed to music, Warner Music is now seeking to use it to help young people with speech disorders.

The American group recently teamed up with Apple Music to create “saylists”, music playlists for people who have trouble pronouncing consonants like “ch”, “t”, “l” or “f”. They contain popular tracks such as “Don’t Start Now” by Dua Lipa, “Don’t Phunk With My Heart” by the Black Eyed Peas, “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I, or even “Road Trippin ‘” by the Reds. Hot Chili Peppers. To create these “saylists”, an algorithm analyzed the catalog of more than 70 million songs from Apple Music in order to select those which repeat difficult sounds the most often.

“Helping people express themselves is at the heart of what we do – and we hope that by creating such an engaging and accessible therapeutic tool as Saylists, we can help anyone who has difficulty expressing themselves.”Tony Harlow, managing director of Warner Music, told BBC News.

70 million people suffer from stuttering

If the process of creating “saylists” may be surprising, it is far from incongruous. According to the American association The Stuttering Foundation, more than 70 million people in the world stutter. Or 1% of the population. The phenomenon is however more marked in children since 5% of them go through a period of stuttering that lasts six months or more.

While three quarters of children overcome these speech disorders by entering adolescence, 1% continue to suffer from it. But music could help them improve their pronunciation, especially when they are little. A study German study, conducted among children with delayed language development, showed that music therapy was beneficial to them and that they had “clinically significant changes”.