Music Listening, Music Therapy, Phenomenology and Neuroscience

Appendix 3.04 Survey of

The Neurosciences and Music I

V

Conference 2011

Learning and Memory

Title, Category

Aim

Mus. Material, Cultural Ref.

Technology & Procedure

Main focus of interest

Conclusion

48. Psyche Loui, Charles Li and Gottfried Schlaug
    Behavioural and neural correlates of normal and disordered music learning ability Cat. 10

: Learning

Cat. 11: Disorder

49. Isabelle Peretz and Jenny Saffr

an

Learning speech but not musical sounds in congenital amusia Cat. 10

: Learning

Cat. 11: Disorder

Drawing on a combination of music theory, cognitive science, and structural neuroimaging, we investigated the effect of

tone-

deafness on music learning

Background for the investigation:

Individuals who suffer from congenital amusia have experienced lifelong difficulties in processing of music. The deficit can be traced down to an impair

• 
  

ment in fine

-grained pitch

discrimination. Their language abilities appear intact. One possible account for this dissociation between music and speech is that amusics lack of normal exposure to music because of their lifel

ong history of musical

failures

Tone

-deaf individuals

and

matched controls underw

ent

diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and a series of

behavioral

tests that assessed their learning of a new artificial musical grammar, based on the Bohlen

-Pierce scale, an

alternative musical system that adheres to basic psychoacoustic principles of consona

nce and disso

nance,

but is completely

unfamiliar to

all participants

A group of 11 adults with congenital amusia, and their matched controls, were exposed to a continuous stream of syllables or tones for at least 21 min. Their task was to try to identify words or motifs, define

d by transitional

probabilities

Behavioral results showed

significantly below

-normal

learning performance in tone

• 
  

deaf subjects. Furthermore, DTI data showed reduced volume of the arcuate fasciculus in tone

-deaf

subjects, and significant correlations between learning and tract volume in the ri

ght

inferior arcuate fasciculus

Amusics might be able to acquire basic musical abilitie

s

if given appropriate exposure

These findings show that the acquisition of musical structure depends

crucially on

white matter connecting right

hemisphere

brain regions

responsible for sound

categorization and production

The results show that amusics can learn novel words as easily as controls whereas they systematically fail on musical materials.

Thus, limited exposure cannot fully account for the musical disorder