It's not your fault you're tone-deaf. It's your brain's

Smithtr

Smithtr

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There’s nothing quite like a karaoke night to best demonstrate how delusional some are in regards to their singing ability. But don’t blame your tone-deaf friends for their off-key renditions of “Love Is A Battlefield” or “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Truly tone-deaf people can blame their brains, finds a small new study.

Estimated to affect 4% of the population, tone-deaf individuals can neither perceive nor produce musical sequences accurately. “The best way to think of amusia…is to think of it as an auditory-motor disorder,” says Gottfried Schlaug, PhD, of Harvard Medical Center.

“There are [several] components that could be impaired or dysfunctional. The most likely component is that [which] receives auditory feedback of vocal output,” says Schlaug. In other words, we misinterpret the sounds we hear coming from our mouths.

A paper published in a recent issue of Brain by Philippe Albouy and colleagues at INSERM in France found that the deficits seen in such individuals originate in a region of the brain called the auditory cortex.

In the study, nine congenital amusics (meaning individuals who are tone-deaf from birth, not due to brain injury) and nine control subjects performed two melodic short-term memory tasks.

The first task had individuals listen to two six-tone musical melody and indicate whether the sequence of notes was the same or different. The second task simply transposed one of the six-tone sequences into a different key.

While listening to the various melodies (192, to be exact), the participants sat very still with a large device covering their heads. The technique, called magnetoencephalography, maps brain activity in real time by recording magnetic fields produced by electrical currents in the brain.

The researchers focused on a particular electrical current called “N100m,” a large, negatively-charged signal that can be detected in everybody roughly 100 milliseconds after a stimulus (in this case, the sound of the melody).

The researchers found that tone-deaf individuals performed poorly on the melody task. They were more likely to incorrectly identify two sequences as being the same or different compared to control subjects, suggesting a deficit in their short-term memory.

Interestingly, the N100m current was abnormally recruited in the tone-deaf brain while listening to the melodies.

Overall, tone-deaf individuals, compared to controls, had fewer connections in the auditory cortex, the portion of the brain that processes sound.

A 3D MRI also revealed altered ratios of white matter (fiber tracts) and gray matter (neural cell bodies) between amusics and controls in two brain regions: the right inferior frontal gyrus and the right superior temporal gyrus, implicated in language production and sound processing, respectively.

So what causes this altered anatomy? Is it learned? Genetic? Abnormal prenatal or childhood brain development? The answer, so far, is unknown. But the next time you groan at your friends’ cringe-worthy vocal renditions, simply blame the early brain responses of their auditory cortices.
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It's not your fault you're tone-deaf. It's your brain's - The Body Odd
 
...care to dance with me? ...so it will be 2 right feets and 2 left feet OR FOUR left feet lmao call it 'train crash dancing'
 
As I understand the matter-Hearing is in one's brain-where it interprets what the "ear" sends.

Dancing is a reaction to music exercising one's " 3 left feet".-not in hippo/rhino style!
 
drphil said:
As I understand the matter-Hearing is in one's brain-where it interprets what the "ear" sends.

Dancing is a reaction to music exercising one's " 3 left feet".-not in hippo/rhino style!
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LOL, can you dance?
 
One of my sons is an "inspiring rapper"...:giggle:...complained he was tone deaf...took him to the doctor for a physical and they found cotton embedded in both ears from using Q-tips too deeply....They were removed and now he hears fine.....and no infection or a busted eardrum, thank goodness!

Q-tips are dangerous if not used right...But sometimes kids won't listen no mater how many times you caution or tell them....Finally he got the message and there are no Q-tips in the house for him to use.
 
rockin'robin said:
One of my sons is an "inspiring rapper"...:giggle:...complained he was tone deaf...took him to the doctor for a physical and they found cotton embedded in both ears from using Q-tips too deeply....They were removed and now he hears fine.....and no infection or a busted eardrum, thank goodness!

Q-tips are dangerous if not used right...But sometimes kids won't listen no mater how many times you caution or tell them....Finally he got the message and there are no Q-tips in the house for him to use.
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that's why we don't use cheap/generic Q-tips.
 
There is with dancing an interesting feature-trying to hear loud dance music and try to hear person's speaking. My ongoing reference to "Cochlear Implant exercise"

Been to a few dances over the last 25 years
 
Geeze, they are not deaf meaning they are hearing. They can not perceive (become aware of the senses) to music. That is why the hearing people have problem of not getting the notes which turn out for them is Tone-deaf. They can not tell the difference from the high and the low notes of the music. I read about that on Tone-Deaf when it comes with sense. It could be logical that their brains could not detect the sounds of notes.

So what I am saying that it is for hearing people, not us as deaf and hard of hearing. :roll:
 
As I understand matters: Hearing and DEAFness are at the opposite ends of "understanding sound". Between these 2 "poles" are variants of Hearing loss-from none to Profound.
I assume being "tone deaf" is not a "widespread difficulty" but is in a specific person with it.
Just another part of our "hearing" of which not so easy to grasp.
 
I am actually pretty good with notes. I can tell the difference in stepwise notes, and i can detect thirds, fourths, etc. very accurately. However, I can't sing, which sucks because my family are all good singers but me. Oh well!
 
im a wee bit like that too, im from a musical family but me sing? nope not a chance, tried, its impossible
 
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