Congenital amusia | Brain | Oxford Academic

Congenital amusia | Brain | Oxford Academic: In this 2002 study, "a research effort has been made to document in detail the behavioural manifestations of congenital amusia."

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What's amusing about amusia?

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Welcome to 4Amusia.com , a place to find out more about something called amusia, a condition that can make it impossible to carry a tune or learn to play a musical instrument. Widespread ignorance of this condition—commonly referred to in derogatory terms like tone deafness or tin ears—can lead to social and emotional problems for those who have it. I know, because I have amusia. Amusia is defined as: "a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition" ( Wikipedia ). Some studies suggest that as many as 4% of people are born with an innate inability to recognize musical tones or to reproduce them. This is referred to as congenital amusia. In 2018, I discovered that my lifelong failure to sing or learn guitar—despite great effort—was due to congenital amusia, not some weird character defect (although you can still find music coaches who insist that amusiacs are just being lazy). When time permits, I pl
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Being tone deaf is not a choice, it's a disability

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The main purpose of this blog post is to introduce people to an excellent piece of amusia research titled: Effects of vocal training in a musicophile with congenital amusia . If you want to dive right into it, here is a link to  the article as a PDF file . If you want a little more context, please read the following. The Scenarios of Johnny and Barry Many people may be familiar with this scenario: Johnny is having trouble learning to read. His teachers say he must try harder, but however hard Johnny tries, he still has trouble reading. Rumors spread that Johnny is lazy, or stupid, or both.  Then someone realizes Johnny has Congenital Word Blindness, better known as dyslexia, which these days is a widely-acknowledged learning disorder. In many progressive communities that diagnosis opens the door to sympathy, understanding, and resources developed to help Johnny deal with his disability (in the UK, dyslexia is classed as a disability under the Equality Act of 2010). Here's anothe
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Altered functional connectivity during speech perception in congenital amusia

Interesting! Congenital amusia equates to "a lifelong history of unreliable pitch processing" and this paper suggests that people with this condition, which includes me, "downweight pitch cues during speech perception and instead rely on other dimensions such as duration." The results indicate that: "the reliability of perceptual dimensions is linked with functional connectivity between frontal and perceptual regions, and suggest a compensatory mechanism." Reading the paper is a great way to sample current thinking on how humans perceive the many different elements of person-to-person communication. Pre-publication manuscript of the paper is online here .
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