great deal on the integration of spatial and form perception, because the iden-
tity of a musical note is determined both by its form and by its position on the
musical staff. An established fact in neuroscience is that form perception and
location perception follow different pathways in the visual system (Zeki 1993).
It is easy to see how musical alexia (an inability to read musical notes) could
arise from damage to either of these two visual pathways, since reading music
requires perception of both form and position. It is also easy to see that this
damage would not necessarily interfere with other musical skills.
A relatively common dissociation is that found between lyric and melodic
production. Oscar Marin (1982) reports the case of an aphasic patient who
could sing with normal intonation and rhythm, so long as she wasn’t required
to sing lyrics. Her ability to join lyrics with melodies was totally impaired.
The neurological syndrome called auditory agnosia is a more general and
severe perceptual deficit that usually arises from bilateral damage to the tem-
poral lobes, in particular the auditory cortex (Heschl’s area). Patients with au-
ditory agnosia are unable to organize the sounds in the environment, so that
speech, animal sounds, bells, and other noises are perceived as a jumbled, unin-
terpretable stream of noise. A few cases of purely musical agnosia have been
described in which patients are unable to organize music into a coherent per-
cept, although their ability to understand speech and nonmusical stimuli re-
mains intact. The extent to which they can understand the ‘‘music’’ of normal
speech (known as ‘‘prosody’’) has not been studied thoroughly. For example,
are they able to distinguish a question from a statement if the only cue is a ris-
ing contour at the end of the sentence? These remain questions open for study.
13.9 Memory for Musical Pitch and Tempo
To what extent do our memories of music retain perceptual details of the music,
such as the timbre, pitch, and tempo of songs we have heard? Do we remember
all the details of the piece, even details that are not theoretically important?
Specifically, since melody is defined by the relation of pitches and rhythms, it
would be easy to argue that people do not need to retain the actual pitch and
tempo information in order to recognize the song. However, the music theorist
Eugene Narmour (1977) argued that listening to music requires processing of
both absolute information (schematic reduction) and relative information (irre-
ducible idiostructural), so the question is whether both types of information
reach long-term memory.
If people do encode the actual pitches of songs, this would be something like
having ‘‘perfect pitch’’ or ‘‘absolute pitch’’ (AP). If you play a tone on the piano
for most people and ask them which tone you played, they cannot tell you
(unless they watched your hand). The person with AP can reliably tell you
‘‘that was a Ca.’’ Some APers can even do the reverse: if you name a tone, they
can produce it without any external reference, either by singing or by adjusting
a variable oscillator. Those with AP have memory for the actual pitches in
songs, not just the relative pitches. In fact, most APers become agitated when
they hear a song in transposition because it sounds wrong to them.
It has been estimated that AP is rare, occurring in only 1 out of 10,000 people.
However, AP studies tend to test only musicians. There is an obvious reason
Memory for Musical Attributes 303