Born to dance but beat deaf: A new form of congenital amusia
Research highlights
▸ Almost everyone, but beat deaf individuals, can feel the beat in music and move in time to it. ▸ Novel motion capture and psychophysical techniques can measure dance. ▸ Musical time has a distinct neurobiological origin from pitch. ▸ Beat deafness presents a new form of congenital amusia related to time and not to pitch. ▸ Beat deafness may unlock a key principle specific to the human genotype. ▸ Strict periodicity might be unique to music.
Section snippets
Case history
Mathieu was discovered through a recruitment of subjects who felt they could not keep the beat in music, such as in clapping in time at a concert or dancing in a club. Mathieu was the only clear-cut case among volunteers who reported these problems. Despite a lifelong love of music and dancing, and musical training including lessons over several years in various instruments, voice, dance and choreography, Mathieu complained that he was unable to find the beat in music. Participation in music
Synchronization tasks
We studied full-body motion in time with a popular Merengue song, compared to motion with a metronome. The synchronization responses of Mathieu were compared to the performance of a group of adults with variable ages and musical backgrounds. In follow-up experiments, we tested whether the deficit was related to the type of body movement performed, the type of music presented, or the tempo. Synchronization is typically considered to be accurate when movements match with the musical beat in both
Detection task
Mathieu's disorder may arise from a perceptual or motor disorder, or from a failure of sensorimotor integration. In order to assess his beat perception abilities without associated action, we created a task that required no movement while similar in perceptual demands to the synchronization task. In this detection task, subjects watched 5 s video clips of the experimenter moving to the Merengue or to the metronome; viewers judged whether the dancer was “in time” with the auditory soundtrack. The
General discussion
Here we report the first case of beat deafness in a university student, Mathieu, who exhibits a remarkable difficulty to synchronize with music. Despite intact motor and auditory systems, Mathieu is “out of time” when he synchronizes his movements with most music; furthermore, he cannot detect normally whether someone else is moving in time with the same music. These deficiencies stand in sharp contrast with the precise synchronization of full-body motion of the general (untrained) population.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Mathieu for his collaboration, Frances Spidle for help with the figures and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous draft. This work was supported by grants from Fonds de Recherche en Santé du Québec to JPS, from the Academy of Finland to PT, and from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Institute of Health Research and a Canada Research Chair to IP and to CP.
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2020, NeuropsychologiaCitation Excerpt :Supporting a dissociation between neural mechanisms that are critical for self-paced and synchronization tapping, lesions and brain-stimulation studies have shown that the cerebellum and premotor cortex are important for auditory-motor synchronization, but their impairment does not affect generation of self-paced rhythms (Kornysheva and Schubotz, 2011; Schwartze et al., 2016). In addition to motor regions, synchronization tasks also engage bilateral auditory cortex (Grahn and Rowe, 2009, Chen et al., 2008), and difficulties in synchronization are associated with deficits in low-level auditory encoding (Nozaradan et al., 2016; Tierney and Kraus, 2013) and in perception-action coupling (Palmer et al., 2014; Phillips-Silver et al., 2011; Repp and Su, 2013; Schwartze et al., 2016; Sowiński and Dalla Bella, 2013). In contrast, spontaneous self-paced tapping seems to depends more heavily on the basal ganglia, as patients with basal ganglia lesions show higher variability and a lack of isochrony in self-paced tapping, but nonetheless are able to synchronize accurately to a broad range of external rhythms (Schwartze et al., 2011).
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