He is lightyears from a musical genius. A blind autistic person will most likely develop stunning absolute pitch. His brain do not process auditory information to higher semantic levels. He can't compose anything relevant. He is a human spectral analysator, not a musical genius.
Agreed.
It is summed up quite correctly by Sloboda at the end of part 2, one of the BIGGEST names in music cognition. Emotionally, he is completely absent. Note the lack of verbal communication in finding his errors. Almost sounds a case of the CLASSIC and famous split corpus callosum cases in individuals being being able to sense and comprehend but unable to communicate. Similarly, Derek probably could recite entire passages of foreign languages after one listen without understanding any of what it means.
As far as the improv is concerned, he understands the syntax of the chords. Being able to chose notes over those chords is a response to that syntax. His music lacks those elements in which people with normal socialized human emotions (secondary human emotions) have. Animacy cues, hints of empathy and sympathy in music; those elements of music that make to people without these conditions which make music in fact music.
A very similar and perhaps more profound account of such
musical savants was Blind Tom. According to some accounts, Blind Tom's ability at age 6 matched Derek Paravicini's during this taping. My ignorance of part 1 will probably place me incorrect to say the cause of Derek's condition might have been
retrolental fibroplasia.
Furthermore, as Robert Jourdain deftly puts it in his book
Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, "The abstract manipulations that are at the heart of composition are quite beyond a savant. His musical hierarchy is shallow and inflexible."
