Amusia

One highly exciting topic in music cognition is that of amusia and the perception of prosody in amusics. In simplistic terms, amusia refers to tone deafness. "Tone deafness" here does not refer to our subjective use of that phrase in everyday life, such as when applying it to a poor singer (with normal music perception abilities). Its application is much more limited, and is determined objectively by means of tests such as the MBEA (Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia). These tests involve same v different judgment tasks w.r.t. melody and rhythm. A lot of significant work in this area has already been done by Isabelle Peretz and her colleagues. Peretz, Ayotte, Hyde, Zatorre, Penhune, Patel were some of the initial researchers who successfully narrowed down the problem of amusia to a pitch-perception related disorder.

Amusia in a lot of cases is congenital (suggesting a genetic basis) and is estimated to affect about 4% of the population (a surprisingly high figure!). Research seems to indicate that it is not an all-or-nothing disorder. Amusia can impair music perception abilities from a low to a high degree, and might be existing within a continuum. Amusia can also be acquired on account of brain damage. What makes amusia an interesting area of study is the nature of evidence from amusics showing partial impairment of linguistic prosody judgments in some cases, and the lack of it in some cases. This inconsistency with regard to the accompaniment of a linguistic prosody disorder along with impaired musical abilities has urged researchers to explore this area in further detail. Current research findings were presented in a talk given by Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences and Music conference in Montreal. A poster related to judgment of prosody in tonal languages was presented by Sebastien Nguyen et al. I will talk about some of these research findings in greater detail in my next blog.