9. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Human rights' conflicts consist of a collision of an “attacking” against a “defending” right. In the case of babies' observation, even when extracting musical data and material from them, there is nothing blamable. Infants and toddlers are on the course of a natural process, an undisrupted development and their contribution to arts can only offer joy. We often have children songs using children’s babbling language. Of course, there is always a limit on how a child can be exposed by video- or sound-recording them, since, in fact, this is done without their consent. This depends on the parents' discretion. If ten 1 y.o. babies are put on a stage with microphones around them which process their cries, the result would certainly be interesting, but, most probably, social services would take up this matter.
Listening to an aphasic person can be an extremely musical event. A composer would listen to imaginative contours, endless repetitions, motives and onomatopoeias which we all have, as creators, many times tried to produce.
One of Dante's early impressions of Hell is an acoustic one. He uses the word “tumulto” to describe a cacophonic horrible chaotic soundscape. How useful would it be, as a sound reference for someone who would try to create such a sound environment, to have a realistic reference.
On the other hand, we should not forget that aphasia is a disorder. The obvious difference with prelinguistic stage is that the aphasic person's natural development is disrupted. The “material” they would produce would certainly be interesting, but, at the same, the issue of respect in human’s personality and vulnerability is raised.
Roman Jakobson states that (at least at the time he wrote his book on child language and aphasia) there were few linguistically useful case-studies of aphasia, since “aphasics were not often available for (even) linguistic observation”. In fact, the existing linguistic data are, most of the times, based on the contributions of psychiatrists and neurologists, who, of course, are not specialized in the linguistic field. This is also the reason why, although I have personal experience on prelinguistic language observation, I have very little on aphasia. My sources on the latter subject are mainly theory books and some limited videos I had access to.
In my view, respect to human personality comes first. People with disorders should be treated with great care and simply putting a microphone in front an aphasic person just to record material for a musical piece would cross this border. I do not reject such recording sessions, but I believe that such a process should be connected by offering something back to this community as well. An example of treating autism through music has already been given (footnote 35). Cooperation with specialists in the field could be a suggested way to think of how this contribution could take place.