Drumming and autism: what the strongest studies found
Clem Burke joined Blondie in 1975 and was still the band's drummer half a century later. He is on Heart of Glass, Call Me, and One Way or Another. He is also the reason some of the best drumming science in the world exists. In 2008 he teamed up with two sports scientists, Steve Draper and Marcus Smith, to found the Clem Burke Drumming Project, which started by wiring him up to measure what a live gig actually demands of a drummer's body and grew into a long research program on what drumming does for the people who play it. The University of Chichester gave him an honorary doctorate for it in 2022. He died in April 2025, at seventy, and the project that carries his name is still running.
Its most important result so far is a study of drum lessons for autistic teenagers, and it is the strongest drumming study anyone has run.
What did the trial find?
Researchers at the University of Chichester and King's College London, working under the project's banner, published the trial in PNAS in 2022. Thirty-six autistic adolescents, aged 16 to 20, were randomly assigned to drum lessons or a control group. The drumming group got two lessons a week for eight weeks.
Two things changed. Guardians reported fewer difficulties with hyperactivity and inattention in the teens who drummed. And brain scans showed changes in resting-state connectivity in circuits linked to inhibitory control, the brain's braking system.
The study's limits are ordinary ones for research this young: 36 people, eight weeks, and guardians who knew which group their teen was in. What makes it the strongest study in the field is everything around those limits. It was randomized, it had a control group, and it measured the brain as well as the behavior. In drumming research, that combination is rare.
What came before it?
Two smaller school projects from the same research group, and neither one was an autism study. The Milestone School pilot, reported in 2018, followed special-school pupils through ten weeks of drumming; teachers rated the children as more attentive and better regulated afterward, though there was no control group. A study by Lowry and colleagues looked at children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, with an intervention sample in the single digits; staff reported reduced difficulties and improved motor skill.
Read as evidence, both are small and unblinded. Read as groundwork, they did their job: the children kept showing up, the adults around them kept noticing something, and the findings were promising enough to justify the real trial that followed.
Why drums?
The project states its purpose plainly on its own site: drumming lessons and performances "to overcome developmental and behavioural difficulties, improve coping skills, and encourage emotional and physical expression for people of all ages."
Drummers might add a few reasons of their own. A drum answers on the first hit. A pattern can be taught by showing rather than telling. The practice is physical and rhythmic from the first minute, and progress is audible immediately, to the player and to everyone in the room. Those are craft observations, not findings. But they are probably part of why, across all three studies, the most consistent result is the least technical one: the kids kept drumming.
What does this mean for Beatwired?
There is no straight line from these studies to us. Beatwired is a rhythm practice built for teens and adults with ADHD; the trial was run with autistic teenagers taking real drum lessons from real teachers, and the ADHD research is its own, younger literature, which we cover in what the studies say about kids with ADHD and grade on our Science page.
We wrote this post because it is the best drumming science there is, and because we like how it started: a working rock drummer who spent decades wondering what his instrument was doing, and went and found scientists to help him ask properly.
Sources
Lowry, Fothergill, Smith et al. The effect of learning to drum on behavior and brain function in autistic adolescents. PNAS, 2022.
University of Chichester, Clem Burke Drumming Project trial announcement, 2022.
The Clem Burke Drumming Project: founding, partners, and research program.
University of Chichester, on its connection with Clem Burke and his honorary doctorate.
Milestone School drumming pilot, reported via ScienceDaily, 2018.
Lowry et al. Rock drumming enhances motor and psychosocial skills of children with emotional and behavioral difficulties. International Journal of Developmental Disabilities.
Variety, Clem Burke, drummer for Blondie, dies at 70, April 2025.