Just because you're tone deaf doesn't mean you aren't musical

Psychologists estimate that around 4 per cent of the population have a specific impairment affecting their processing of pitch. Tone deafness, or "amusia" to use its technical name, runs in families and it often goes hand in hand with an inability to sing and to recognise and enjoy melodies. No wonder that people with amusia are usually thought of as not being musical.However, in a new paper Jessica Phillips-Silver and her colleagues argue that the musical deficits associated with amusia may have been exaggerated. They've specifically explored the possibility that amusics have intact beat perception and dancing abilities. On conventional tests, amusia usually involves a beat perception deficit but the researchers say that could be because standard tests of beat perception require intact pitch perception, putting people with amusia at a disadvantage.The investigation began by asking 10 people with amusia to detect the beat pattern of several melodies - specifically whether the beat was a march or a waltz. Tested the usual way, with melodies on a piano, and the people with amusia were impaired relative to normal controls. However, when they were tested with drums (an "unpitched" instrument), the people with amusia were just as able to detect beat patterns as controls.Next, the researchers tested ten more people with amusia on their ability to detect beat patterns from the movement of their own body. Following the guidance of an experimenter, they bounced for two minutes in time...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs