Browsing by Subject "Perception of music"

The aim of this study was to gain new information regarding music perception and its relations to other domains of perception, especially speech. Disorders of music and speech perception, known as amusia and aphasia, respectively, have traditionally been regarded as dissociated deficits based on studies of brain damaged patients. This has been taken as evidence that music and speech are perceived by largely separate and independent networks in the brain. However, recent studies of congenital amusia have begun to broaden this view by showing that the deficit is associated with problems in perceiving speech, especially intonation and emotional prosody. This study investigates the association between perception of music and speech prosody using a task that does not rely on melodic or emotional prosodic cues. The study also seeks to determine if music perception is associated with visuospatial perception, pitch perception, verbal working memory, and various biographical music-related variables. The data from 62 healthy participants was used. The participants carried out four computerized tests: the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), which measures the perception of music; a visuospatial test, which was constructed as analogous to one of the subtests of MBEA; and tests of the perception of pitch and speech prosody. Verbal working memory was evaluated using the Digit Span - subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III. Biographical music-related variables were measured with a questionnaire. MBEA scores correlated significantly with scores on tests of speech prosody and pitch perception whereas there were no notable correlations between the MBEA and the visuospatial and working memory tests. The perception of speech prosody and pitch perception were not correlated. This pattern of results suggests that the link between music and prosody perception is not mediated just by pitch. Interestingly, the relationship was strongest concerning the perception of rhythm in music, which indicates that temporal cues may be important in linking music and speech prosody. Musical education and hobbies were found to be variably related to the melodic or rhythmic aspects of music perception. Taken together, these results raise the question of whether the processing of rhythm and melody can sometimes be more separated than the processing music and speech. The mean and the distribution of the MBEA scores were found to be very similar to those reported in previous international studies, thereby indicating that MBEA can be considered a functional study method also in the Finnish population.