Training Mandarin-speaking amusics to recognize pitch direction: Pathway to treat musical disorders in congenital amusia?

2013 ◽  
Vol 134 (5) ◽  
pp. 4064-4064
Author(s):  
Fang Liu ◽  
Cunmei Jiang ◽  
Tom Francart ◽  
Alice H. Chan ◽  
Patrick C. Wong
Keyword(s):  
Congenital Amusia ◽  
Pitch Direction

SPEECH INTONATION PERCEPTION DEFICITS IN MUSICAL TONE DEAFNESS (CONGENITAL AMUSIA)

2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANIRUDDH D. PATEL ◽  
MEREDITH WONG ◽  
JESSICA FOXTON ◽  
ALIETTE LOCHY ◽  
ISABELLE PERETZ
Keyword(s):  
Rate Of Change ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
French Canadian ◽  
Congenital Amusia ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Pitch Direction ◽  
Melody Perception ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Musical Tone ◽  
Important Evidence

TO WHAT EXTENT DO MUSIC and language share neural mechanisms for processing pitch patterns? Musical tone-deafness (amusia) provides important evidence on this question. Amusics have problems with musical melody perception, yet early work suggested that they had no problems with the perception of speech intonation (Ayotte, Peretz, & Hyde, 2002). However, here we show that about 30% of amusics from independent studies (British and French-Canadian) have difficulty discriminating a statement from a question on the basis of a final pitch fall or rise. This suggests that pitch direction perception deficits in amusia (known from previous psychophysical work) can extend to speech. For British amusics, the direction deficit is related to the rate of change of the final pitch glide in statements/ questions, with increased discrimination difficulty when rates are relatively slow. These findings suggest that amusia provides a useful window on the neural relations between melodic processing in language and music.

scholarly journals Perceptual Learning of Pitch Direction in Congenital Amusia

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fang Liu ◽  
Cunmei Jiang ◽  
Tom Francart ◽  
Alice H. D. Chan ◽  
Patrick C. M. Wong
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Learning ◽  
Auditory Training ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Normal Functioning ◽  
Positive Evidence ◽  
Adaptive Tracking ◽  
Congenital Amusia ◽  
Pitch Direction ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Training Post

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder of musical processing for which no effective treatments have been found. The present study aimed to treat amusics’ impairments in pitch direction identification through auditory training. Prior to training, twenty Chinese-speaking amusics and 20 matched controls were tested on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) and two psychophysical pitch threshold tasks for identification of pitch direction in speech and music. Subsequently, ten of the twenty amusics undertook 10 sessions of adaptive-tracking pitch direction training, while the remaining 10 received no training. Post training, all amusics were retested on the pitch threshold tasks and on the three pitch-based MBEA subtests. Trained amusics demonstrated significantly improved thresholds for pitch direction identification in both speech and music, to the level of non-amusic control participants, although no significant difference was observed between trained and untrained amusics in the MBEA subtests. This provides the first clear positive evidence for improvement in pitch direction processing through auditory training in amusia. Further training studies are required to target different deficit areas in congenital amusia, so as to reveal which aspects of improvement will be most beneficial to the normal functioning of musical processing.

Explicit Attention to Pitch Direction Enhances Mandarin Tone Learning

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Smayda ◽  
Gayatri Rao ◽  
Han-Gyol Yi ◽  
Bharath Chandrasekaran ◽  
W. Todd Maddox
Keyword(s):  
Pitch Direction ◽  
Mandarin Tone

Absolute pitch ability is not associated with advantage in musical tension processing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linshu Zhou ◽  
Fang Liu ◽  
Tang Hai ◽  
Jun Jiang ◽  
Dongrui Man ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Detection Threshold ◽  
Absolute Pitch ◽  
Discrimination Threshold ◽  
Pitch Change ◽  
Letter Naming ◽  
Direction Discrimination ◽  
Pitch Direction ◽  
Lower Accuracy ◽  
Tonal Hierarchy ◽  
The Stability

Absolute pitch (AP), a superior ability of pitch letter naming in the absence of a reference note, has long been viewed as an indicator of human musical talent and thus as evidence for the adaptationist hypothesis of music evolution. Little is known, however, whether AP possessors are superior to non-AP possessors in music processing. The present study investigated whether the AP ability facilitates musical tension processing in perceptual and experienced tasks. Twenty-one AP possessors and 21 matched non-AP possessors were tested using novel melodies in C and non-C contexts. Results indicated that the two groups provided comparable ratings of perceived and felt tension for melodies in both contexts. While AP possessors demonstrated lower accuracy with longer reaction time than non-AP possessors in naming movable solfège syllables for pitch in the pretest, their tension rating profiles showed a similar tonal hierarchy as non-AP possessors in regard to the stability of the ending tones of the melodies in both major and minor keys. Correlation analyses suggested that musical tension ratings were not significantly related to performance in pitch letter, movable solfège syllable naming, pitch change detection threshold, or pitch direction discrimination threshold for either group. These findings suggest that pitch naming abilities (either pitch letter or movable solfège syllable naming) do not benefit processing of perceived or felt musical tension, providing evidence to support the hypothesis that AP ability is not associated with advantage in music processing.

Pitch Processing of Music and Speech in Congenital Amusia

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-167
Author(s):  
Cun-Mei JIANG ◽  
Yu-Fang YANG
Keyword(s):  
Pitch Processing ◽  
Congenital Amusia

Tracking of pitch probabilities in congenital amusia

2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (7) ◽  
pp. 1483-1493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Omigie ◽  
Marcus T. Pearce ◽  
Lauren Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Congenital Amusia

scholarly journals Statistical learning of speech, not music, in congenital amusia

2012 ◽  
Vol 1252 (1) ◽  
pp. 361-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Peretz ◽  
Jenny Saffran ◽  
Daniele Schön ◽  
Nathalie Gosselin
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Learning ◽  
Congenital Amusia

The Design Research of Millimeter-Wave Homing Empty - Empty Ammunition Ballistics

2014 ◽  
Vol 575 ◽  
pp. 337-342
Author(s):  
Wei Shi Xie ◽  
Zhi Hua Xiao ◽  
Jian Tang
Keyword(s):  
Target Tracking ◽  
Millimeter Wave ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Optical Axis ◽  
Terminal Velocity ◽  
Target Model ◽  
Search Area ◽  
Pitch Direction ◽  
Trajectory Guidance ◽  
Terminal Guidance

The millimeter-wave terminal guidance ammunition monitoring scanning field is small. The modified design is in order to improve the search section trajectory guidance. This study established seeker search area to capture the target model, which leads to the missile engine unpowered glide distance formula after flameout. At the millimeter-wave terminal on the missiles contraction section ballistic. Each missile is designed for the flat road, the swash decline ballistic programs. Flat missile road program scans and does not shrink. Its flight speed falls and declines rapidly, has different gliding distance and terminal velocity. After the missile engine is flameout, its start-gliding speed is great. Ramp fell ballistic program enhances the air-air (or air-ground) guided missile’s gliding ability, helping to improve range. But shortcomings are that target tracking scanning domain contracts. Using the seeker optical axis in the pitch direction can achieve accurate positioning with the height precession. Two ballistic designs can both meet the target seeker’s scanning, thus effectively improve the striking precision.

scholarly journals Meta-analytic evidence for the non-modularity of pitch processing in congenital amusia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique T Vuvan ◽  
Marília Nunes-Silva ◽  
Isabelle Peretz
Keyword(s):  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Pitch Perception ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
Pitch Discrimination ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Performance Gap ◽  
Pitch Processing ◽  
Congenital Amusia ◽  
Musical Pitch ◽  
Using Data

A major theme driving research in congenital amusia is related to the modularity of this musical disorder, with two possible sources of the amusic pitch perception deficit. The first possibility is that the amusic deficit is due to a broad disorder of acoustic pitch processing that has the effect of disrupting downstream musical pitch processing, and the second is that amusia is specific to a musical pitch processing module. To interrogate these hypotheses, we performed a meta-analysis on two types of effect sizes contained within 42 studies in the amusia literature: the performance gap between amusics and controls on tasks of pitch discrimination, broadly defined, and the correlation between specifically acoustic pitch perception and musical pitch perception. To augment the correlation database, we also calculated this correlation using data from 106 participants tested by our own research group. We found strong evidence for the acoustic account of amusia. The magnitude of the performance gap was moderated by the size of pitch change, but not by whether the stimuli were composed of tones or speech. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between an individual's acoustic and musical pitch perception. However, individual cases show a double dissociation between acoustic and musical processing, which suggests that although most amusic cases are probably explainable by an acoustic deficit, there is heterogeneity within the disorder. Finally, we found that tonal language fluency does not influence the performance gap between amusics and controls, and that there was no evidence that amusics fare worse with pitch direction tasks than pitch discrimination tasks. These results constitute a quantitative review of the current literature of congenital amusia, and suggest several new directions for research, including the experimental induction of amusic behaviour through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and the systematic exploration of the developmental trajectory of this disorder.

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