Preserved appreciation of aesthetic elements of speech and music prosody in an amusic individual: A holistic approach

Ariadne Loutrari,Marjorie Perlman Lorch

doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2017.03.010

Abstract

We present a follow-up study on the case of a Greek amusic adult, B.Z., whose impaired performance on scale, contour, interval, and meter was reported by Paraskevopoulos, Tsapkini, and Peretz in 2010, employing a culturally-tailored version of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia. In the present study, we administered a novel set of perceptual judgement tasks designed to investigate the ability to appreciate holistic prosodic aspects of ‘expressiveness’ and emotion in phrase length music and speech stimuli. Our results show that, although diagnosed as a congenital amusic, B.Z. scored as well as healthy controls (N=24) on judging ‘expressiveness’ and emotional prosody in both speech and music stimuli. These findings suggest that the ability to make perceptual judgements about such prosodic qualities may be preserved in individuals who demonstrate difficulties perceiving basic musical features such as melody or rhythm. B.Z.’s case yields new insights into amusia and the processing of speech and music prosody through a holistic approach. The employment of novel stimuli with relatively fewer non-naturalistic manipulations, as developed for this study, may be a useful tool for revealing unexplored aspects of music and speech cognition and offer the possibility to further the investigation of the perception of acoustic streams in more authentic auditory conditions.

Highlights

Music processing deficits can arise due to congenital neurogenic anomalies, and are commonly referred to under the term ‘amusia’ (Peretz & Hyde, 2003)
A relatively large percentage of their amusic participants displayed a profile of music engagement and appreciation that was very close to that of controls. These findings suggest that music appreciation is not necessarily compromised in the presence of congenital amusia and highlight the variability of music deficits in amusics
The authors of the initial study were interested in determining whether the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA; Peretz et al, 2003), which has been widely used in North America and Western Europe, could be employed to diagnose music perception deficits in populations exposed to different musical idioms

Summary

Introduction

Music processing deficits can arise due to congenital neurogenic anomalies, and are commonly referred to under the term ‘amusia’ (Peretz & Hyde, 2003). Congenital amusia has been characterised as a lifelong condition in a number of studies (e.g., Hyde, Zatorre, & Peretz, 2011; Patel, 2003; Tillmann, Schulze, & Foxton, 2009) This term, does not refer to a homogeneous pattern of disorder, as various aspects of music cognition may be differentially affected. The authors of the initial study were interested in determining whether the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA; Peretz et al, 2003), which has been widely used in North America and Western Europe, could be employed to diagnose music perception deficits in populations exposed to different musical idioms. The adapted Greek battery was shown to have a much stronger diagnostic value with smaller standard deviations in the performance of Greek participants across subtests

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