Article

Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder that is characterized
primarily by difficulties in the pitch domain. The aim of the present study was
to investigate the perception of musical timbre in a group of individuals with
congenital amusia by probing discrimination and short-term memory for real-world
timbral stimuli as well as examining the ability of these individuals to sort
instrumental tones according to their timbral similarity. Thirteen amusic
individuals were matched with thirteen non-amusic controls on a range of
background variables. The discrimination task included stimuli of two different
durations and pairings of instrumental tones that reflected varying distances in
a perceptual timbre space. Performance in the discrimination task was at ceiling
for both groups. In contrast, amusic individuals scored lower than controls on
the short-term timbral memory task. Amusic individuals also performed worse than
controls on the sorting task, suggesting differences in the higher-order
representation of musical timbre. These findings add to the emerging picture of
amusia as a disorder that has consequences for the perception and memory of
musical timbre, as well as pitch.
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Langue : ANGLAIS