Sensitivity to musical emotion is influenced by tonal structure in congenital amusia

Cunmei Jiang,Fang Liu,Patrick C M Wong

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-08005-x

Abstract

Emotional communication in music depends on multiple attributes including psychoacoustic features and tonal system information, the latter of which is unique to music. The present study investigated whether congenital amusia, a lifelong disorder of musical processing, impacts sensitivity to musical emotion elicited by timbre and tonal system information. Twenty-six amusics and 26 matched controls made tension judgments on Western (familiar) and Indian (unfamiliar) melodies played on piano and sitar. Like controls, amusics used timbre cues to judge musical tension in Western and Indian melodies. While controls assigned significantly lower tension ratings to Western melodies compared to Indian melodies, thus showing a tonal familiarity effect on tension ratings, amusics provided comparable tension ratings for Western and Indian melodies on both timbres. Furthermore, amusics rated Western melodies as more tense compared to controls, as they relied less on tonality cues than controls in rating tension for Western melodies. The implications of these findings in terms of emotional responses to music are discussed.

Highlights

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder of music processing, which cannot be attributed to prior brain lesion, hearing loss, or any cognitive or socioaffective disturbance or lack of exposure to music[1]
We tested a relatively large sample of Mandarin-speaking amusics and matched controls on tension ratings of Western and Indian melodies played on piano and sitar
Both amusics and controls gave higher tension ratings for both Western and Indian melodies played on sitar than piano

Summary

Introduction

Congenital amusia (hereafter amusia) is a lifelong disorder of music processing, which cannot be attributed to prior brain lesion, hearing loss, or any cognitive or socioaffective disturbance or lack of exposure to music[1]. Despite showing intact implicit structural processing in music[7], amusics demonstrate deficits in processing musical syntax and tonality in an explicit manner[8]. Amusics showed some sensitivity to the association between major mode and happiness in the complex-tone, but not in the sine-tone condition This difference may result from amusics’ deficits in the perception of harmonicity, since the two timbres (complex-tone and sine-tone) differed in harmonic spectra. Timbre, and these attributes of sound can be perceived without implicit or explicit knowledge of tonal system information[19] Using these psychoacoustic cues, human and nonhuman species have shown similarities in encoding and decoding emotional signals in acoustic communication[20,21,22]. Owing to the deficits in the perception of harmonicity, amusics were impaired in emotional evaluations based on harmonicity (but not on roughness), as revealed by Marin et al.[17]

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