Listening to music is a hobby that people typically enjoy. However, there is an abnormality in the brain which makes it impossible for some people to be able to detect pitch changes and tones to music. This disorder known as amusia is one in which the brain cannot process musical pitch, or melodies. When typically developing individuals hear music, for people with amusia, music sounds similar to rattling pots and pans (Sacks, 2007). This disorder can also be known as tone deafness and according to Peretz, Cummings, and Dube (2007), amusia can be present from birth (congenital amusia) or by other means such as a stroke. Zendel, Lagrois, Robitaille, and Peretz (2015) suggests that brain activation of early right anterior negativity was present in both amusics and non amusics when detecting a percussive click in a melody but was absent in amusics when detecting inappropriate pitches in the same melody. Early right anterior negativity is a response that activates whenever a person hears an inappropriate clashing of harmonic music. When it comes to changes in musical pitch, people with amusia cannot consciously detect them, but could this also apply to nonmusical pitch? Amusia is indeed a music disorder, but it may also affect the ability to comprehend nonmusical pitches, emotional and speech prosody.

Reed, Cahn, Cory, and Szaflarski (2011) conducted a case study involving a 64 year old Hungarian man who has amusia. The researchers identified him as G.G. He is a retired electrical engineer who is multilingual with Hungarian being his primary language, and English being his second language. In addition, G.G. is also studying German, Russian, and Hebrew. He has not experienced any abnormal amounts of hearing loss. G.G has no history of stroke, or other neurological damage or psychiatric illnesses which indicates that G.G’s musical impairments come from congenital amusia. All throughout G.G’s schooling, he’s had plenty of opportunities for musical training. He was an exceptional student but failed in every music course he took from first grade to his senior year of high school. In addition, his piano teacher stated that G.G. could not learn music and quit after one lesson. G.G. describes music as an “organized noise with no more tonality than a car door slamming” (Reed et al. 2011, p. 308). He never listens to music because it is invasive to his ears and prefers complete silence. In addition, his Hebrew prayers which are usually chanted sound completely monotone to G.G. Reed et al. (2011) tested G.G’s abilities to recognize sounds from non-musical instruments such as a whistle the ocean, and white noise. They compared G.G’s answers with six control participants. G.G. got 18 out of 22 correct responses and he only failed at identifying musical instruments. In addition, G.G. could also tell which non-musical object made a higher pitched sound. For example, he knew that a door bell had a higher pitch than a dentist drill. He correctly identified 26 out of 30 sounds which was not significantly different from the six control participants. It seemed as though G.G’s disabilities remained exclusively within music.

Thompson, Marin, and Stewart (2012) researched to determine if people with amusia have difficulties matching the correct emotional tones in spoken speech. The emotional tones in speech is known as emotional prosody. When someone is happy for instance, the tone of their voice is usually a higher pitched tone. They gathered 12 participants with amusia and 12 matching control participants for the study. Each heard about 96 phrases and had to match their tone of voice to up to six different emotions. Emotions included, happy, sad, tender, afraid, irritated, and no emotion. Although people with amusia did a good job matching the emotions together overall, they had the most trouble identifying happiness, sadness, and tenderness with percentages of correct answers being respectively 70%, 55%, and 65%. These results seem to suggest that those with amusia have a difficult time identifying exaggerated emotions such as happiness and sadness.

People with amusia may have difficulties understanding tonal languages. Mandarin Chinese for example, is a tonal language. Words in this language have different meanings if spoken with different tones. For example, the word /ma/ means mother when spoken in a high tone, hemp with a rising tone, horse with a low tone, and to scold with a falling tone. The following video demonstrates the five tones of Mandarin Chinese using the word /ma/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XRXYaHOlpo.

Liu, Jiang, Wang, Xu, and Patel (2015) studied to see if Mandarin speakers with amusia can differentiate between different tones within their own language. They gathered 16 amusic Mandarin speakers and 16 matching control participants to write down whatever they hear. Each participant heard speeches with a flat tone and a natural tone with conditions gradually becoming noisier. The results of this study suggested that participants with amusia could accurately understand Mandarin Chinese in both noisy and calm conditions. The participants, both amusic and control groups, performed better when the tone was natural as opposed to when the tone was flat.

Hausen, Torppa, Salmela, Vainio, and Sarkamo (2013) also conducted a study that related to amusia and speech prosody. Speech prosody as opposed to emotional prosody has to do with the tones of sentences. Prosody usually helps distinguish a statement from a question. When asking questions for example, one would raise the tone of their voice at the end of the sentence. The following video demonstrates the raised tone at the end of questions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqNhEzrWQpY.

In this video of Family Guy, Stewie encourages Brian to break up with his girlfriend so that he would not have to hear her speak sentences with a rising tone at the end. Although the clip is rude, it demonstrates what people sound like when they ask questions. Speech prosody also focuses on the pronunciation of words, mainly where the accent of the word is located. For example, with the word defense, the accent is placed on both the first syllable when talking about a football game (DE-fense), and in the second syllable when talking about the legal system (de-FENSE). Hausen et al. (2013) gathered 64 nonamusic Finnish adults to test how well their music perception and speech prosody are. They tested music perception by using a subtest of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) which is also a test to determine whether or not someone has amusia or not. Normally, The MBEA is a series of tests that assesses six components of music: scale, contour, interval, rhythm, metric, and music memory (Nunes-Silva & Haase, 2012). In this study, participants were tested in both rhythmic and melodic music skills which were called the Off-beat and Out-of-key subtests respectively. Each of the 24 trials contained either an unusual delay in the beat, or a melody that contained a wrong note. Since the Finnish language has one fixed stressed syllable, participants had to identify whether or not the stress pattern was considered a compound word or a phrase separated by two different words. For example, say if the phrase was the English equivalent of “blue bell.” The utterance would either be a compound word or “BLUEbell” or a phrase separated by two different words such as “blue BELL” (Hausen et al. 2013, p. 5). Typically, one could differentiate between the two phrases due to listening to when the words are being accented. The results of this study showed a clear correlation between speech prosody and music perception especially rhythmic perception. This suggests a relationship between music perception and speech prosody. Hausen et al. (2017) were able to control potential outliers due to rejecting professional musicians, those with a music education and also those with amusia in order to see if there is a regular correlation between music and speech prosody. Being able to distinguish between stressed syllables in language is a beneficial task when communicating with others, and those with amusia may have difficulties doing so.

Thompson et al. (2012) examined to see if amusics can identify emotions through emotional prosody. Lolli, Lewenstein, Basurto, Winnik and Loui (2015) conducted a similar study. The participants in this study each listened to three types of speech: one that was unfiltered, one that contained a low pass filter, which is when higher pitches get cut off, and high pass filter, which is when lower pitches get cut off from the sound. About 40 participants both amusic and control participants had to listen to a sentence and identify which out of the same six emotions that Thompson and his colleagues (2012) studied. They listened to about 84 sentences and identified the emotion in each sentence. The results from the unfiltered speech showed no correlation between pitch perception and emotional identity but a negative correlation between low pass filtered speech, and emotional identity. This means that the lower the tone filter was used, the harder it was for people to correctly name the emotion being portrayed. These results may suggest that people with amusia are listening to non-pitched cues to help identify emotions. To control for this third factor, Lolli et al. (2015) conducted a second experiment in which a high pass filter was used. The results suggested no correlation between emotional identity and pitch perception. These results were different from the results from Thompson’s et al. (2012) study. Lolli et al. (2015) discussed a possibility that people with amusia were learning throughout the experiment because amusics who listened to the low pass filter speech performed better on the high pass filter than those who listened to the unfiltered speech first. Another possibility could be that high sounds can play an important role in identifying emotions because high frequency sound effects are cut out when applying a low pass filter.

Trimmer and Cuddy (2008) also explored to determine an association between musical training and emotional prosody. They gathered 100 participants and tested their skills in music, and their emotional intelligence. To assess music skills, participants were given a music questionnaire from a previous study conducted by Cuddy, Balkwill, Peretz, and Holden (as cited by Trimmer and Cuddy, 2008) as well as the MBEA. They were given about 28 questions that factored in the number of years a participant played their instrument, the number of instruments they know how to play, the type of lessons they received, whether or not it was one on one lessons, a class, etc, and the number of hours they currently practice. For emotional intelligence, participants were given the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) which is a test that measures how well someone perceives emotion, facilitate thought, understand emotions, and managing emotions (MSCEIT, 2017). After the preliminary screenings, they were asked to listen to speeches, and identify the same emotions as the previous studies only they excluded tenderness and no emotion. The results suggested no link between musical training and emotional prosody recognition which also differs from Thompson’s et al. (2012) study. Participants that scored a near perfect score on the MBEA performed no different than participants who scored a low score on the MBEA. A limitation that was mentioned indicated that the emotions the participants had to identify were extreme emotions so therefore, musical training could help identify subtle emotions such as sarcasm.

These research findings suggest that the presence of amusia does not affect people’s understanding of language other than music capabilities. The only researchers found a significant link between music skills and emotional and speech prosody was Thompson’s et al. (2012) study and Hausen’s et al. (2013) study respectively. Thompson’s study may suggest a third factor that enabled his correlation between amusia and emotional prosody. For instance, the amusic participants in the study could also have an undiagnosed disorder that could have difficulties identifying emotions such as Asperger’s disease. In addition, Hausen and his colleagues (2013) did not even study amusics in his study so there is no way to determine how well amusics could have performed in their study. These results suggested that with exception of music capabilities, a person with amusia should be able to lead a happy, productive life.

References

Hausen M., Torppa, R., Salmela, V. R., Vaino, M., & Sarkamo, T. (2013). Music and speech prosody: A common rhythm. Frontiers in Psychology, 4(566), 1-16.

Howcast, (2013, November, 13). 5 tones of Mandarin Chinese [Video file]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XRXYaHOlpo

Lolli, S. L., Lewenstein, A. D., Basurto, J., Sean Winnik, S., & Psyche Loui, P. (2015) Sound frequency affects speech emotion perception: Results from congenital amusia. PNAS, 109(46), 19027–19032.

Liu, F., Jiang, C., Wang, B., Xu, Y., & Patel, A. D. (2015). A music perception disorder (congenital amusia) influences speech comprehension. Neuropsychologica, 66, 111-118.

MacFarlane, S., Colton, G., & Michels, P. (2006, November 12). Whistle while your wife works [Television series episode]. In A. Borstein (Producer), Family Guy. Los Angeles, CA: Fox Broadcasting Company. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqNhEzrWQpY.

The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. (2017) Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. Retrieved from: http://www.eiconsortium.org/measures/msceit.html

Nunes-Silva, M., & Haase, V. G. (2012). Montreal battery of evaluation of amusia: Validity evidence and norms for adolescents in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Dementia and Neuropsychologica, 4, 244-252.

Peretz, I.,  Cummings, S., & Marie-Pierre Dube. M. (2007). The genetics of congenital amusia (Tone Deafness): A family-aggregation study.  The American Journal of Human Genetics. 81, 582-588.

Reed, C. L., Cahn, S. J., Cory, C., & Szaflarski, J. P. (2011). The genetics of congenital amusia (tone deafness): A family-aggregation study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 28(5), 305-321.

Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia Tales of Music in the Brain-Amusia. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPRW0wZ9NOM.

Thompson, W. F., Marin, M. M., & Stewart, L. (2012). Reduced sensitivity to emotional prosody in congenital amusia rekindles the musical protolanguage hypothesis. PNAS, 109, 19027–19032.

Trimmer, C. G., & Cuddy, L. L. (2008). Emotional intelligence, not music training, predicts recognition of emotional speech prosody. Emotion, 8(6), 838–849.

Zendel, B. R., Lagrois, M. E., Robitaille, N., & Peretz, I. (2015). Attending to pitch information inhibits processing of pitch information: The curious case of amusia. The Journal Of Neuroscience, 35(9), 3815-3824.