Neuropsychology, mental cognitive models and music processing

Abstract

Two separate and distinct problems are discussed in this article: 1) the relations between clinical cases of amusias and their lesional topography, and 2) the problem of defining more closely the nature of music, its cognitive structure and the possible ways by which the human brain (the mind) is capable of hearing and making sense of it. (1) Despite the lesional predominance of the right cerebral hemisphere, there are frequent exceptions and, within right-sided lateralization, there are very few topographical elements that allow a precise clinico-topographical predictability. Contrast with clinico-anatomical aspects of aphasias is noted. I propose that in the case of music the low degree of constancy in the functional topography is greatly due to the fact that music does not depend solely on its acoustic auditory sensory nature, but is primarily dependent on its internal organizational principles. This contrasts with language and speech which have more constant codes (letters, phonemes, lexico-semantic r...