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Isabelle Peretz

Publications and source records attributed to Isabelle Peretz.

32 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed2003

What is specific to music processing? Insights from congenital amusia.

Musical abilities are generally regarded as an evolutionary by-product of more important functions, such as those involved in language. However, there is increasing evidence that humans are born with musical predispositions that develop spontaneously into sophisticated knowledge bases and procedures that are unique to music. Recent findings also suggest that the brain is equipped with music-specific neural networks and that these can be selectively compromised by a congenital anomaly. This results in a disorder, congenital amusia, that appears to be limited to the processing of music. Recent evidence points to fine-grained perception of pitch as the root of musical handicap. Hence, musical abilities appear to depend crucially on the fine-tuning of pitch, in much the same way that language abilities rely on fine time resolution.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2003

Modularity of music processing.

The music faculty is not a monolithic entity that a person either has or does not. Rather, it comprises a set of neurally isolable processing components, each having the potential to be specialized for music. Here we propose a functional architecture for music processing that captures the typical properties of modular organization. The model rests essentially on the analysis of music-related deficits in neurologically impaired individuals, but provides useful guidelines for exploring the music faculty in normal people, using methods such as neuroimaging.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed2003

Varieties of musical disorders. The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia.

Multiple disorders of musical abilities can occur after brain damage. Conversely, early brain anomalies or vast brain injuries may sometimes spare ordinary musical skills in individuals who experience severe cognitive losses. To document these incidences, comprehensive behavioral testing is required. We propose to use the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) because it is arguably the best tool currently available. Over the last decade, this battery was developed and validated in populations with brain damage of various etiologies. Furthermore, the MBEA is theoretically motivated and satisfies important psychometric properties. It is sensitive, normally distributed, reliable on test-retest, and correlates with Gordon's Musical Aptitude Profile, another more widely used battery of tests. To promote its wide usage, the MBEA is now available upon request. In addition, individual MBEA data of 160 normal participants of variable age and education have been made available to all via the internet.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed2003

Cortical correlates of acquired deafness to dissonance.

Patient I.R., who had bilateral lesions in the auditory cortex but intact hearing, did not distinguish dissonant from consonant musical excerpts in behavioral testing. We additionally found that the electrical brain responses did not differentiate musical intervals in terms of their dissonance/consonance, consistent with the idea that this phenomenon depends on the integrity of cortical functions.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2003

Congenital amusia interferes with the ability to synchronize with music.

Eight adults with a music-specific learning disability (i.e., tone deafness, but we prefer the term "congenital amusia") were asked to tap along with music (e.g., Ravel's Bolero) and with nonmusical isochronous sequences (i.e., noise bursts). The amusic persons' tapping performance was poorly synchronized with music compared to that of nine matched control participants. By contrast, synchronization with the noise bursts was normal, suggesting that amusic persons' timing difficulty is limited to music.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

"Out-of-pitch" but still "in-time". An auditory psychophysical study in congenital amusic adults.

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disability, commonly known as tone deafness, that prevents afflicted individuals from developing basic musical skills despite normal audiometry and above-average intellectual, memory, and language skills. Although it is estimated that 4% of the general population would be born with such a musical handicap, the underlying cause is presently unknown. Recently, we proposed that this disorder could be traced to a deficit in pitch perception on the basis of a single case. Here we provide psychophysical evidence for the existence of a generalized defect that is both fine grained and specific to pitch because time is unaffected.

Female↗
PubMed2003

Effects of relaxing music on salivary cortisol level after psychological stress.

The goal of the present study was to determine whether relaxing music (as compared to silence) might facilitate recovery from a psychologically stressful task. To this aim, changes in salivary cortisol levels were regularly monitored in 24 students before and after the Trier Social Stress Test. The data show that in the presence of music, the salivary cortisol level ceased to increase after the stressor, whereas in silence it continued to increase for 30 minutes.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Time course of melody recognition: a gating paradigm study.

Recognizing a well-known melody (e.g., one's national anthem) is not an all-or-none process. Instead, recognition develops progressively while the melody unfolds over time. To examine which factors govern the time course of this recognition process, the gating paradigm, initially designed to study auditory word recognition, was adapted to music. Musicians and nonmusicians were presented with segments of increasing duration of familiar and unfamiliar melodies (i.e., the first note, then the first two notes, then the first three notes, and so forth). Recognition was assessed after each segment either by requiring participants to provide a familiarity judgment (Experiment 1) or by asking them to sing the melody that they thought had been presented (Experiment 2). In general, the more familiar the melody, the fewer the notes required for recognition. Musicians judged music's familiarity within fewer notes than did nonmusicians, whereas the reverse situation (i.e., musicians were slower than nonmusicians) occurred when a sung response was requested. However, both musicians and nonmusicians appeared to segment melodies into the same perceptual units (i.e., motives) in order to access the correct representation in memory. These results are interpreted in light of the cohort model (Marslen-Wilson, 1987), as applied to the music domain.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2002

Congenital amusia: a disorder of fine-grained pitch discrimination.

We report the first documented case of congenital amusia. This disorder refers to a musical disability that cannot be explained by prior brain lesion, hearing loss, cognitive deficits, socioaffective disturbance, or lack of environmental stimulation. This musical impairment is diagnosed in a middle-aged woman, hereafter referred to as Monica, who lacks most basic musical abilities, including melodic discrimination and recognition, despite normal audiometry and above-average intellectual, memory, and language skills. The results of psychophysical tests show that Monica has severe difficulties with detecting pitch changes. The data suggest that music-processing difficulties may result from problems in fine-grained discrimination of pitch, much in the same way as many language-processing difficulties arise from deficiencies in auditory temporal resolution.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Congenital amusia: a group study of adults afflicted with a music-specific disorder.

The condition of congenital amusia, commonly known as tone-deafness, has been described for more than a century, but has received little empirical attention. In the present study, a research effort has been made to document in detail the behavioural manifestations of congenital amusia. A group of 11 adults, fitting stringent criteria of musical disabilities, were examined in a series of tests originally designed to assess the presence and specificity of musical disorders in brain-damaged patients. The results show that congenital amusia is related to severe deficiencies in processing pitch variations. The deficit extends to impairments in music memory and recognition as well as in singing and the ability to tap in time to music. Interestingly, the disorder appears specific to the musical domain. Congenital amusical individuals process and recognize speech, including speech prosody, common environmental sounds and human voices, as well as control subjects. Thus, the present study convincingly demonstrates the existence of congenital amusia as a new class of learning disabilities that affect musical abilities.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

A case study of pure word deafness: modularity in auditory processing?

AL, a woman with an acquired disturbance of auditory processing beginning in the second decade, was originally diagnosed as having pure word deafness. Recent analysis with a wide range of stimuli suggests that her comprehension deficit also extends to a subset of musical and non-verbal environmental sounds. The perceptual demands of the different auditory stimuli appear to account for part of the apparent material specificity. Additionally, over the years, the presumed temporal lobe cortical pathology has been supplemented by a mild to moderate, peripheral low-frequency hearing loss and evidence of dysfunction in lower level auditory processing pathways. The current peripheral dysfunction closely resembles cases recently labeled as auditory neuropathy. The diagnosis of pure word deafness should not be based on a limited set of auditory stimuli; additionally, a careful assessment using modern audiological techniques should be performed to evaluate peripheral auditory functions.

Achievement↗
PubMed2002

Brain specialization for music.

Music, like language, is a universal and specific trait to humans. Similarly, music appreciation, like language comprehension, appears to be the product of a dedicated brain organization. Support for the existence of music-specific neural networks is found in various pathological conditions that isolate musical abilities from the rest of the cognitive system. Cerebrovascular accidents, traumatic brain damage, and congenital brain anomalies can lead to selective disorders of music processing. Conversely, autism and epilepsy can reveal the autonomous functioning and the selectivity, respectively, of the neural networks that subserve music. However, brain specialization for music should not be equated with the presence of a singular "musical center" in the brain. Rather, multiple interconnected neural networks are engaged, of which some may capture the essence of brain specialization for music. The encoding of pitch along musical scales is likely such an essential component. The implications of the existence of such special-purpose cortical processes are that the human brain might be hardwired for music.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Episodic encoding in normal aging: attentional resources hypothesis extended to musical material.

The goal of the present study was to examine age-related changes in musical episodic memory for novel tunes. This was conducted by manipulating the encoding condition in a recognition paradigm. After receiving memory instructions (intentional condition), older and younger participants obtained equivalent hits. In contrast, when intentional encoding was accompanied by a dancing judgment (dancing + intentional condition), the recognition performance of the older persons was severely impaired. Impaired recognition was also found when participants only judged the excerpts without being instructed to memorize them (dancing judgment condition). Although older participants demonstrated a preserved ability to perform the dancing judgment on its own, this ability was not optimal and likely precluded the initiation of more elaborate encoding strategies. These results suggest that asking older persons to divide their attention in the study phase reduces the quality of their musical encoding. Given this extension to musical material, we discuss the notion that the age-related attentional resource decline appears to be domain-general rather than specific to verbal material.

Adult↗