Abnormal electrical brain responses to time deviance in beat deafness.

Humans have the spontaneous capacity to track the beat of music. Yet some individuals show marked difficulties. To investigate the neural correlates of this condition known as beat deafness, the cortical electric activity of ten beat-deaf adults, the largest cohort studied so far, as well as of 14 matched controls (Experiment 2), and 16 university students (Experiment 1) were examined.

Do variants in the coding regions of FOXP2, a gene implicated in speech disorder, confer a risk for congenital amusia?

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder that compromises the normal development of musical abilities in 1.5-4% of the general population. There is a substantial genetic contribution to congenital amusia, and it bears similarities to neurodevelopmental disorders of language.

Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality.

Humans spontaneously invent songs from an early age. Here, we exploit this natural inclination to probe implicit musical knowledge in 33 untrained and poor singers (amusia). Each sang 28 long improvisations as a response to a verbal prompt or a continuation of a melodic stem.

Cross-Frequency Brain Network Dynamics Support Pitch Change Detection.

Processing auditory sequences involves multiple brain networks and is crucial to complex perception associated with music appreciation and speech comprehension. We used time-resolved cortical imaging in a pitch change detection task to detail the underlying nature of human brain network activity, at the rapid time scales of neurophysiology. In response to tone sequence presentation to the participants, we observed slow inter-regional signaling at the pace of tone presentations (2-4 Hz) that was directed from auditory cortex toward both inferior frontal and motor cortices.

The relationship between acoustic and musical pitch processing in adolescents.

Amusia is defined as a difficulty processing the tonal pitch structure of music such that an individual cannot tell the difference between notes that are in-key and out-of-key. A fine-grained pitch discrimination deficit is often observed in people with amusia. It is possible that an intervention, early in development, could mitigate amusia; however, one challenge identifying amusia early in development is that identifying in- and out-of-key notes is a metacognitive task.

Influence of Background Musical Emotions on Attention in Congenital Amusia.

Congenital amusia in its most common form is a disorder characterized by a musical pitch processing deficit. Although pitch is involved in conveying emotion in music, the implications for pitch deficits on musical emotion judgements is still under debate. Relatedly, both limited and spared musical emotion recognition was reported in amusia in conditions where emotion cues were not determined by musical mode or dissonance.

What Makes Musical Prodigies?

Musical prodigies reach exceptionally high levels of achievement before adolescence. Despite longstanding interest and fascination in musical prodigies, little is known about their psychological profile. Here we assess to what extent practice, intelligence, and personality make musical prodigies a distinct category of musician.

The singing voice is special: Persistence of superior memory for vocal melodies despite vocal-motor distractions.

Vocal melodies sung without lyrics (la la) are remembered better than instrumental melodies. What causes the advantage? One possibility is that vocal music elicits subvocal imitation, which could promote enhanced motor representations of a melody. If this motor interpretation is correct, distracting the motor system during encoding should reduce the memory advantage for vocal over piano melodies.

Basic timekeeping deficit in the Beat-based Form of Congenital Amusia.

Humans have the capacity to match movements' timing with the beat of music. Yet some individuals show marked difficulties. The causes of these difficulties remain to be determined.

Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition: Challenges, Insights, and Recommendations.

psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and definitions of "music" and "culture.

Decoding Task-Related Functional Brain Imaging Data to Identify Developmental Disorders: The Case of Congenital Amusia.

Machine learning classification techniques are frequently applied to structural and resting-state fMRI data to identify brain-based biomarkers for developmental disorders. However, task-related fMRI has rarely been used as a diagnostic tool. Here, we used structural MRI, resting-state connectivity and task-based fMRI data to detect congenital amusia, a pitch-specific developmental disorder.

The effects of short-term musical training on the neural processing of speech-in-noise in older adults.

Experienced musicians outperform non-musicians in understanding speech-in-noise (SPIN). The benefits of lifelong musicianship endure into older age, where musicians experience smaller declines in their ability to understand speech in noisy environments. However, it is presently unknown whether commencing musical training in old age can also counteract age-related decline in speech perception, and whether such training induces changes in neural processing of speech.

Musical training improves the ability to understand speech-in-noise in older adults.

It is well known that hearing abilities decline with age, and one of the most commonly reported hearing difficulties reported in older adults is a reduced ability to understand speech in noisy environments. Older adult musicians have an enhanced ability to understand speech in noise, and this has been associated with enhanced brain responses related to both speech processing and the deployment of attention; however, the causal impact of music lessons in older adults has not yet been demonstrated. To investigate whether a causal relationship exists between short-term musical training and performance on auditory tests in older adults and to determine if musical training can be used to improve hearing in older adult nonmusicians, we conducted a longitudinal training study with random assignment.

Poor Synchronization to Musical Beat Generalizes to Speech.

The rhythmic nature of speech may recruit entrainment mechanisms in a manner similar to music. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that individuals who display a severe deficit in synchronizing their taps to a musical beat (called beat-deaf here) would also experience difficulties entraining to speech. The beat-deaf participants and their matched controls were required to align taps with the perceived regularity in the rhythm of naturally spoken, regularly spoken, and sung sentences.

Electrophysiological Responses to Emotional Facial Expressions Following a Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.

The present study aimed to measure neural information processing underlying emotional recognition from facial expressions in adults having sustained a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) as compared to healthy individuals. We thus measured early (N1, N170) and later (N2) event-related potential (ERP) components during presentation of fearful, neutral, and happy facial expressions in 10 adults with mTBI and 11 control participants. Findings indicated significant differences between groups, irrespective of emotional expression, in the early attentional stage (N1), which was altered in mTBI.

Decreased risk of falls in patients attending music sessions on an acute geriatric ward: results from a retrospective cohort study.

Background: Music has been shown to improve health and quality of life. It was suggested that music may also have an impact on gait stability and fall risk. Yet, few studies have exploited music in the hospital setting, and even less so in the geriatric population.

Comorbidity and cognitive overlap between developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia.

This study investigated whether there is a co-occurrence between developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia in adults. First, a database of online musical tests on 18,000 participants was analysed. Self-reported dyslexic participants performed significantly lower on melodic skills than matched controls, suggesting a possible link between reading and musical disorders.

The co-occurrence of pitch and rhythm disorders in congenital amusia.

The most studied form of congenital amusia is characterized by a difficulty with detecting pitch anomalies in melodies, also referred to as pitch deafness. Here, we tested for the presence of associated deficits in rhythm processing, beat in particular, in pitch deafness. In Experiment 1, participants performed beat perception and production tasks with musical excerpts of various genres.

Playing Super Mario increases oculomotor inhibition and frontal eye field grey matter in older adults.

Aging is associated with cognitive decline and decreased capacity to inhibit distracting information. Video game training holds promise to increase inhibitory mechanisms in older adults. In the current study, we tested the impact of 3D-platform video game training on performance in an antisaccade task and on related changes in grey matter within the frontal eye fields (FEFs) of older adults.

Ability to process musical pitch is unrelated to the memory advantage for vocal music.

Listeners remember vocal melodies better than instrumental melodies, but the origins of the effect are unclear. One explanation for the 'voice advantage' is that general perceptual mechanisms enhance processing of conspecific signals. An alternative possibility is that the voice, by virtue of its expressiveness in pitch, simply provides more musical information to the listener.

Specialized neural dynamics for verbal and tonal memory: fMRI evidence in congenital amusia.

Behavioral and neuropsychological studies have suggested that tonal and verbal short-term memory are supported by specialized neural networks. To date however, neuroimaging investigations have failed to confirm this hypothesis. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis of distinct neural resources for tonal and verbal memory by comparing typical nonmusician listeners to individuals with congenital amusia, who exhibit pitch memory impairments with preserved verbal memory.

Cross-classification of musical and vocal emotions in the auditory cortex.

Whether emotions carried by voice and music are processed by the brain using similar mechanisms has long been investigated. Yet neuroimaging studies do not provide a clear picture, mainly due to lack of control over stimuli. Here, we report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using comparable stimulus material in the voice and music domains-the Montreal Affective Voices and the Musical Emotional Bursts-which include nonverbal short bursts of happiness, fear, sadness, and neutral expressions.