Companionship and Sanctuary

As two Autistic artist-researchers, we have felt the challenges of communicative barriers and sensory differences throughout our training and careers as musicians and have often struggled to reconcile the resultant disconnect we perceive between our musical and Autistic selves. This collaborative autoethnographic chapter investigates Autistic music-making, and critically examines how we might better enact collective care in musical spaces by asking: 1) Who are we? ; 2) What do we really like? ; and 3) What do we really need in collaborative musicking? During a week-long artistic residency in 2024, we developed a new creative work that centres our shared experiences as Autistic women and professional musicians. We reflect on our processes developing and workshopping the new work, discussing how our creative and social experiences shaped our experiential understanding of each other and ourselves. We consider what new modes of artistic practice are afforded when we acknowledge sensory, social, and aural differences. Notably, we found that music improvisation and creative scoring can make overt and reaffirm elements of joyful and caring friendship that may appear unusual or asocial to others. By engaging deeply with our differences, we afforded ourselves explicit permission to disregard the weight of the usual sonic, presentational, and sociocultural norms we often feel and instead embrace our own ways of making music we love. As collaborators, we learnt that through actively considering and acknowledging our own and each other’s communication differences, we were better able to navigate the music-making process together. The process has revealed exciting new ways of nurturing our own artistic practices and understandings of self-identity through experimentation with sound and play. We see interesting implications for ethics of care in all musical domains.