Section 2 (Sentence Matching) - Exercise 26

Reference

• Most psychologists agree that music is a universal human instinct. Like any ability, however, there is great variation in people’s musical competence. For every brilliant pianist in the world, there are several people we refer to as tone deaf. It is not simply that people with tone deafness (or amusia) are unable to sing in tune, they are also unable to discriminate between familiar tones or recognise familiar melodies. Such a ‘discord’ can occur after some sort of brain damage, but recently research has been undertaken in an attempt to discover the cause of congenital amusia (when people are born with the condition), which is not associated with any brain damage, hearing problems, or lack of exposure to music.
• When listening to melodies which have had a single note altered so that it is out of key with the rest of the melody, amusics do not notice a problem. As would be expected, amusics perform significantly worse at singing and tapping a rhythm along with a melody than do non-amusics.
• While amusics show deficiencies in their recognition of pitch differences in melodies, they show no impairment in recognising intonation in speech. For example, amusics who speak tonal languages, such as Chinese, do not report having any difficulty discriminating between words that differ only in their intonation. The linguistic cues inherent in speech make discrimination of meaning much easier for amusics.
• Brain scans of amusics do not show any reaction at all to differences smaller than a half step. When changes in tones are large, their brains overreact, showing twice as much activity on the right side of the brain as a normal brain hearing the same thing.
• What makes an amusic worse off than a musical prodigy? Musical ability is culturally valued, and may have been a factor in survival at one point in human history, but it does not seem likely that it is being selected for on an evolutionary scale any longer.

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