The children are the picture of concentration, swaying their bodies to the musical beat while making strokes and dots on their canvasses with their paintbrushes. They listen to instructions attentively, and draw with focus.
The workshop is a regular course at the Children's Institute of Hong Kong, a private school for children with learning disabilities. Music, from nursery rhymes to pop music, is played, and children paint to the beat.
The results can be startling. One child, just finishing a painting of the Hong Kong skyline, is asked by a visitor to name his favourite colour. 'I like white,' he said.
That may seem like a simple answer, but for a child with autism, talking to a stranger and asking her name are things he seldom does outside of this 'Paint the Music' classroom.
The school's director, Dr Jeremy Greenberg, and class instructor Jacqueline Nilsen said they were seeing great improvements in the children. They are so impressed by the results they are taking it a step further by conducting the world's first study of how painting to music can help autistic children improve their social skills.
Nilsen is an artist who was born in Colombia, lived in the United States and moved to Hong Kong in 2008. This teaching method, she says, was inspired by the late US artist Marvin Posey, who would paint in front of an audience while listening to live music. She hopes their first formal study of the teaching method will lead to its spread to other parts of the world.