When People Are 'Deaf' to Music

Music has long been considered a uniquely human concept. In fact, 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 tones or recognize familiar melodies. Such a ‘disorder’ 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. According to the research of Dr. Isabelle Peretz of the University of Montreal, amusia is more complicated than the inability to distinguish pitches. An amusic (a person who has the condition of amusia) can distinguish between two pitches that are far apart but cannot tell the difference between intervals smaller than a half step on the Western diatonic scale, while most people can easily distinguish differences smaller than that. When listening to melodies that 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. The most fascinating aspect of amusia is how specific to music it is. Because of music’s close ties…