You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (11 page)

Speech perception in our native language is a skill that
we have already seen to be enhanced in children who take music lessons compared to children who do not. In adults this relationship remains strong, and furthermore the amount of practice predicts the extent of the improvement in hearing speech in noise.
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Adult musicians also show more finely tuned subcortical brain responses and improved discrimination ability when it comes to distinguishing similar speech syllables (such as ‘ba’ and ‘da’).
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So if you need to follow a conversation at a noisy party then try calling on a musician in case you miss any words.

Finally, it appears that these differences in the early brain responses of adult musicians to speech sounds may also benefit them in later life, when the ability to track fast-changing speech often declines naturally. Evidence suggests that older people (average age 65) who have had a moderate amount (between four and fourteen years) of musical training early in life but who have not played for decades still have faster neural responses to speech sounds compared to matched individuals who had little or no musical training.
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It may be that early musical training sharpens our sound systems in a lifelong manner.

Motor response

Another interesting brain hearing effect that you can see in adult musicians is something that I like to call ‘brain ghosting’ in my classes. When musicians hear a piece of music that they know how to play or sing, their brain shows similar patterns of motor activation compared to that which we would see if they were actually playing or singing. Even when they are lying absolutely stone still in the scanner, their brain is ‘ghosting’ the music performance.
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This ghosting effect is recognised by musicians, who often report that they experience an automatic coupling between musical sounds and their associated motor actions. One
interesting anecdote I heard in relation to this effect was that singers are often advised not to listen to recordings of music immediately before a performance. Even though they would not be singing out loud the fear is that they may strain the voice through automatic triggering of the brain’s music motor ghosting system. Whether or not this could actually happen is not known, but this account suggests that the power of the brain’s musical ghosting system is recognised by professional musicians.

Memory and vision

Some musicians show advantages in mental abilities that have no clear brain basis or at least not one that we can currently narrow down to a single area or response. These types of ability are still worth a mention. They are most likely to be due to the combined effects of many of the areas that we have mentioned in previous sections or they could be caused by things we can’t easily ‘see’ going on in the brain, like more effective use of cognitive strategies.

The primary mental skill of interest, and one I am particularly fascinated by, is memory. Unlike in taxi drivers, we don’t see in musicians a big boost in the main memory brain area, the hippocampus. Despite this, there is little doubt that musicians have better memories in a variety of areas.
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Obviously a musician will do better with a test of musical memory as they have more strategies to be able to remember the sounds: they can picture notes in their head or form a motor memory of what it feels like to play those notes. How about other types of everyday memory task?

One of the first large-scale studies of multiple memory tests across different domains (musical, verbal, visual) was conducted by two of my students Stefania Pileri and Cristina Di Bernardo. They tested matched groups of musicians and non-musicians on eight different memory tests and found that
the musicians had enhanced verbal working memory, where you have to keep more than one thing in your mind at once. They did not find any boost to short-term speech memory (trying to keep a telephone number in mind for a few seconds), or visual or spatial memory.

This study shows clearly that musicians do not demonstrate a general memory enhancement from their training in the same way as working a muscle in the gym will make it bigger. Rather than simply gaining more ‘capacity’ in memory, my hunch is that musicians get better at using their memory, and this is especially marked when it comes to recalling and manipulating sounds, whether they are musical or not.

While we don’t tend to see any effects of musicianship in memory for visual things (other than visual music), we do see some differences in musicians when it comes to visuo-motor skills: the types of skills where you need to co-ordinate your visual and motor systems in order to carry out an action. This is probably due to the fact that musicians who can read music spend so much of their time learning to associate a visual symbol (notes) with a motor response (playing or singing). This process likely sharpens up the systems that allow us to associate visual and motor representations.
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The interesting next step will be to work out how wide-ranging this enhancement really is and whether it can help with other, more everyday skills that require visuo-motor skills such as driving or sports that require hand-eye coordination.

Over the years, many experiments have compared musicians and non-musicians in a variety of situations. In this last section I have outlined some of the most well-known areas of behaviour and ability that show promise for the future. What we need now are more studies that explore exactly
why
musicians perform better in these areas so we can understand better how musical training affects both the brain and behaviour in positive ways and the implications for future learning.
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So far we have managed to demonstrate that music making over a lifetime impacts on our minds – how exactly this happens is a mystery for the future.

A music processing disorder

Now that I have outlined some of the differences you can see when comparing musicians and non-musicians, in both brain and behaviour, I am going to go right to the other end of the spectrum to think about people who struggle with musical sounds.

The aim of this section is to bring us all (especially the musicians) back down to earth and the reality that we are all musical. We are brought up with a stereotypical idea of ‘musicians’ and ‘musicality’ in Western society, one that really means ‘expert’. Experts exist in all walks of life, but that does not alter the fact that we are all incredibly musical. I hope to convince you that the musical skills we possess as adults are, in fact, remarkable. One of the best ways that I can make my case is by putting those musical skills into sharp relief by looking at what happens when they don’t develop in the typical way, as is the case in amusia.

The small population of individuals who have amusia experience genuine and specific music processing difficulties in the absence of a hearing problem or any other notable cognitive, emotional or social impairment.
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I have been lucky enough to study this rare condition for five years and I am going tell you about what it is like to live without effortless human music processing abilities.

The way you sing off-key

Amusia is often referred to as ‘tone deafness’, but let’s be clear. We all know of a friend, colleague or family member who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, whose singing causes genuine alarm, and who should be kept away from karaoke
machines under public health legislation. The majority of these individuals do not have amusia. Most are just poor singers.

The best illustration of this point came from a study by Lola Cuddy.
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She and her team went into Queen’s University in Canada and asked how many of the students thought they were ‘tone deaf’ – around 17 per cent of just over 2000 people put their hands up. The researchers then tested 200 of these students for amusia (see below for how this is done). Only a handful of the apparently ‘tone deaf’ people had a genuine music processing difficulty. The vast majority who believed they were ‘tone deaf’ actually had a fine ear for music; most were just not that interested in music and felt that they could not sing well.

Nearly every self-confessed ‘tone deaf’ person that I know is haunted by the idea that they can’t sing
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– usually based on the harsh judgement of a schoolteacher, a choir leader or even close friends and relatives. Karen Wise and John Sloboda
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studied self-confessed ‘tone deaf’ adults in the UK and found that while they did have some trouble singing, their biggest problem was that they were under-confident. They sang better with accompaniment, leading the authors to suggest that their difficulty was not insurmountable. They and most of the ‘tone deaf’ people you know would respond well to a few singing lessons. Singing training in amusics, by contrast, has led to comparatively fewer improvements and in most cases of severe amusia such training has little effect on the underlying music processing difficulty.
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In general, if a person says ‘I sound terrible when I sing’ then they are unlikely to be tone deaf, as in order to make this judgment a person must be able to recognise the mistakes they are making. An individual with amusia is more likely to say ‘My family and friends think I am a terrible singer, but I’m not really sure either way’.

Manifestations of amusia

It should be no surprise by now that musical understanding can break down in many different ways because so much of the brain is involved in processing music. Some people with amusia struggle with a sense of pitch and how it moves, a crucial skill for tracking how a melody unfolds over time. One of the main difficulties I see in amusics is a problem with the concepts of ‘up’ and ‘down’ in pitch.
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Most of us take that skill completely for granted and can recognise if a sound is rising or falling without thinking, but this can be difficult for someone with amusia.

Other people with amusia may encounter difficulties with the quality of musical sounds, if their perception of timbre is impaired. Timbre is the quality of a sound that means we can tell whether a note is played on a flute or a cello, for example.

A classic case of a timbre problem was the man who went to his doctor with a unique complaint – Madonna was sounding funny all of a sudden. This man was a big Madonna fan but lately he had noticed that her voice was breaking up. He realised that there may be a problem with him (and not Madonna) when he noticed the same new tinny sounds when listening to her old records. This was not an obvious symptom of a medical difficulty to most, but it turned out that the man had suffered a very small stroke that had left him with a mild case of amusia.

Diagnosis

Amusia is currently assessed and diagnosed using the Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia, a test developed by Isabelle Peretz and her colleagues.
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During the test, a person listens to two short melodies and must say whether they think they are the same or different. For people without amusia, the occasional ‘different’ note in this test is pretty easy to spot. In fact, most of them stick out like a sore thumb. It is quite
amazing to sit next to an intelligent person who listens to tunes with an obvious out-of-key note and says ‘same’. But these people with amusia are absolutely genuine – they simply can’t consciously recognise that the bad note does not belong; that it is not ‘right’.

Amusia in the absence of a hearing problem can be either congenital or acquired: congenital means that an individual was probably born with the predisposition for their condition and it developed as they aged despite normal exposure to music. We can’t say for sure that anyone is born amusic, as you can’t measure for lack of a skill (music processing) that has not yet had the chance to fully develop. There are, however, a few documented cases of amusia in childhood, which suggests that the condition can develop early in life.
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Current estimates are that around 4 per cent of the population may have congenital amusia
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though it is possible that this figure is an overestimate.
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Acquired amusia, on the other hand, is the term given when an individual who has had no previous problems with music suddenly exhibits music processing difficulties, usually following a head injury, stroke or a coma.

Amusia is often defined as the inability to comprehend or respond to music; however, this is a misleading label. Individuals with amusia are capable of music appreciation. My much-missed colleague Diana Omigie
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studied the types of music that individuals with congential amusia listen to in their everyday lives. She asked them to complete diary entries about their musical surroundings several times each day for one week when prompted by text message. People were asked about their level of choice in the music selection, their liking for it, the amount of attention paid to it and the effects of the music on their mood and emotions.

Many of the congenital amusics in this study tended to avoid music and preferred not to play it in their homes or
cars.
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But some did enjoy background radio and used music to modulate their level of energy. Interestingly, one of the most popular genres in the amusic group was jazz, a genre that does not rely so much on melody as pop, country or rock.

So the situation with amusia is not clear-cut; amusics don’t hate all music and/or find it incomprehensible. This makes sense if you think about it: music is a complex sound with many different aspects that you might enjoy, such as the timbres, rhythms or lyrics. You might also gain pleasure from the social and cultural aspects, the benefits of music that go beyond the sound. You may associate a favourite tune with a first love, or the tune ‘Happy Birthday’ with the bright eyes of an excited child as they blow out their candles. The depth, power and reach of music in our lives means that we can gain appreciation through many routes, but those routes are likely to be different for a person who has an underlying problem processing the musical sound.