0000000000273755
AUTHOR
Isabelle Peretz
Music as an Aid to Learn New Verbal Information in Alzheimer's Disease
the goal of this study is to assess whether new lyrics are better learned and memorized when presented in a spoken or sung form. In normal young adults, mixed results have been reported, with studies showing a positive, a negative, or a null effect of singing on verbal recall. Several factors can account for this limited aid of music. First, the familiarity of the melody might play a role. Second, successive learning sessions and long-term retention intervals may be necessary. These two factors are considered here in a case study of a participant who suffers from mild Alzheimer's disease. As expected, initial learning of new lyrics showed better performance for the spoken condition over the…
Music and speech listening enhance the recovery of early sensory processing after stroke.
Abstract Our surrounding auditory environment has a dramatic influence on the development of basic auditory and cognitive skills, but little is known about how it influences the recovery of these skills after neural damage. Here, we studied the long-term effects of daily music and speech listening on auditory sensory memory after middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke. In the acute recovery phase, 60 patients who had middle cerebral artery stroke were randomly assigned to a music listening group, an audio book listening group, or a control group. Auditory sensory memory, as indexed by the magnetic MMN (MMNm) response to changes in sound frequency and duration, was measured 1 week (baseline), 3…
Born to dance but beat deaf: A new form of congenital amusia
Humans move to the beat of music. Despite the ubiquity and early emergence of this response, some individuals report being unable to feel the beat in music. We report a sample of people without special training, all of whom were proficient at perceiving and producing the musical beat with the exception of one case (“Mathieu”). Motion capture and psychophysical tests revealed that people synchronized full-body motion to music and detected when a model dancer was not in time with the music. In contrast, Mathieu failed to period- and phase-lock his movement to the beat of most music pieces, and failed to detect most asynchronies of the model dancer. Mathieu’s near-normal synchronization with a…
Harmonic priming in an amusic patient: the power of implicit tasks.
Our study investigated with an implicit method (i.e., priming paradigm) whether I.R. - a brain-damaged patient exhibiting severe amusia - processes implicitly musical structures. The task consisted in identifying one of two phonemes (Experiment 1) or timbres (Experiment 2) on the last chord of eight-chord sequences (i.e., target). The targets were harmonically related or less related to the prior chords. I.R. displayed harmonic priming effects: Phoneme and timbre identification was faster for related than for less related targets (Experiments 1 and 2). However, I.R.'s explicit judgements of completion for the same sequences did not differ between related and less related contexts (Experimen…
Cochlear implant users move in time to the beat of drum music.
Cochlear implant users show a profile of residual, yet poorly understood, musical abilities. An ability that has received little to no attention in this population is entrainment to a musical beat. We show for the first time that a heterogeneous group of cochlear implant users is able to find the beat and move their bodies in time to Latin Merengue music, especially when the music is presented in unpitched drum tones. These findings not only reveal a hidden capacity for feeling musical rhythm through the body in the deaf and hearing impaired population, but illuminate promising avenues for designing early childhood musical training that can engage implanted children in social musical activi…
Amusic does not mean unmusical: Beat perception and synchronization ability despite pitch deafness
Pitch deafness, the most commonly known form of congenital amusia, refers to a severe deficit in musical pitch processing (i.e., melody discrimination and recognition) that can leave time processing--including rhythm, metre, and "feeling the beat"--preserved. In Experiment 1, we show that by presenting musical excerpts in nonpitched drum timbres, rather than pitched piano tones, amusics show normal metre recognition. Experiment 2 reveals that body movement influences amusics' interpretation of the beat of an ambiguous drum rhythm. Experiment 3 and a subsequent exploratory study show an ability to synchronize movement to the beat of popular dance music and potential for improvement when give…
Priming paradigm reveals harmonic structure processing in congenital amusia.
Abstract Deficits for pitch structure processing in congenital amusia has been mostly reported for melodic stimuli and explicit judgments. The present study investigated congenital amusia with harmonic stimuli and a priming task. Amusic and control participants performed a speeded phoneme discrimination task on sung chord sequences. The target phoneme was sung either on a functionally important chord (tonic chord, referred to as “related target”) or a less important one (subdominant chord, referred to as “less-related target”). Correct response times were faster when the target phoneme was sung on tonic chords rather than on subdominant chords, and this effect was less pronounced, albeit si…