A new article about congenital amusia has just been published in Cerebral Cortex by Krista Hyde, Robert Zatorre and Isabelle Peretz. As you can expect I was extremely interested in their findings! (see previous posts for details of my work in congenital amusia). Neuroscience studies of amusia are quite rare largely because of the difficulty in generating large enough groups of participants. However, when they do happen these studies are fascinating as they provide a unique insight into how the brain processes music. What did we know so far about the brain in amusia? Krista’s previous studies and those from other labs too (e.g. Mandell et al, 2007, Loui et…

The main project I work on at Goldsmiths is an investigation of congenital amusia.  So what is congenital amusia? Individuals with amusia don’t develop basic musical abilities, despite normal exposure to music during childhood, normal education levels and IQ, and no known neurological or hearing impairments. Amusia has been likened to other congenital (i.e. present from birth) disorders such as prosopagnosia (problems with processing faces), dyslexia (problems with language), and dyscalculia (problems with numbers), but the focus of difficulty in amusia is in processing music-like sounds (n.b. this can include aspects of speech too). Amusics should be distinguished from those individuals who describe themselves as “tone deaf” on the basis…