Fractionating the musical mind: Insights from Congenital Amusia

A small percentage of the population report a lifelong failure to recognize familiar tunes or tell one tune from another, frequently complain that music sounds like a “din” and often avoid the many social situations in which music plays a crucial role. Such individuals, termed ‘congenitally amusic’ lifelong difficulties with music and perform poorly on a standardized battery of musical listening tasks (Peretz, 2003). This disorder provides us with the opportunity to investigate the cognitive architecture of music, and its relation to other domains, such as language and spatial cognition. Using a large group of congenitally amusic individuals, recruited via an online musical listening test (www.delosis.com/listening/home.html), the present research aims to elucidate precisely which perceptual and cognitive mechanisms are at fault in amusia, whether disordered musical processing has implications for language and the extent to which such difficulties can impact upon sociocultural and affective functioning.