Abstract
The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) is a battery of tests that assesses six music processing components: scale, contour, interval, rhythm, metric, and music memory. The present study sought to verify the psychometric characteristics of the MBEA in a sample of 150 adolescents aged 14-18 years in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and to develop specific norms for this population. We used statistical procedures that explored the dimensional structure of the MBEA and its items, evaluating their adequacy from empirical data, verifying their reliability, and providing evidence of validity. The results for the difficult levels for each test indicated a trend toward higher scores, corroborating previous studies. From the analysis of the criterion groups, almost all of the items were considered discriminatory. The global score of the MBEA was shown to be valid and reliable (rK-R20=0.896) for assessing the musical ability of normal teenagers. Based on the analysis of the items, we proposed a short version of the MBEA. Further studies with larger samples and amusic individuals are necessary to provide evidence of the validity of the MBEA in the Brazilian milieu. The present study brings to the Brazilian context a tool for diagnosing deficits in musical skills and will serve as a basis for comparisons with single case studies and studies of populations with specific neuropsychological syndromes.
Highlights
Music is a complex cognitive ability that requires efficient brain mechanisms to be processed
The temporal dimension has two distinct modules: rhythm and meter.16.19 According to Peretz et al (2003),[8] this model led to the development of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), providing theoretical support for the battery as a tool for neuropsychological assessment
We found no validated instruments in the Literatura Latino Americana em Ciências da Saúde (LILACS) or Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) databases, evaluating musical deficits in the Brazilian context
Summary
Music is a complex cognitive ability that requires efficient brain mechanisms to be processed. The neuropsychological cognitive model of musical processing was constructed from double dissociations observed in different studies of amusic individuals following brain injury In acoustic processing, these studies allowed the differentiation of separate modules for processing music, language, and other environmental sounds.[5,10,11,12,13,14] With regard to music perception, these studies support the existence of two dissociated and parallel routes for musical input: temporal and melodic.[13,15,16,17,18] The melodic route is divided into three distinct modules: tonal encoding, contour, and interval.[15,16] The temporal dimension has two distinct modules: rhythm and meter.16.19 According to Peretz et al (2003),[8] this model led to the development of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), providing theoretical support for the battery as a tool for neuropsychological assessment. The present investigation sought to assess the psychometric characteristics of the MBEA and develop norms for the adapted version of the MBEA27 based on a sample of Brazilian adolescents from the city of Belo Horizonte
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