Random feedback makes listeners tone-deaf

Abstract

The mental representation of pitch structure (tonal knowledge) is a core component of musical experience and is learned implicitly through exposure to music. One theory of congenital amusia (tone deafness) posits that conscious access to tonal knowledge is disrupted, leading to a severe deficit of music cognition. We tested this idea by providing random performance feedback to neurotypical listeners while they listened to melodies for tonal incongruities and had their electrical brain activity monitored. The introduction of random feedback was associated with a reduction of accuracy and confidence, and a suppression of the late positive brain response usually elicited by conscious detection of a tonal violation. These effects mirror the behavioural and neurophysiological profile of amusia. In contrast, random feedback was associated with an increase in the amplitude of the early right anterior negativity, possibly due to heightened attention to the experimental task. This successful simulation of amusia in a normal brain highlights the key role of feedback in learning, and thereby provides a new avenue for the rehabilitation of learning disorders.

Predictive Processes and the Peculiar Case of Music

“…This formulation enjoys support from a recent study [45], in which the precision of predictions was manipulated experimentally. Participants listened to melodies with or without out-of-key notes and were asked if the melody contained an anomalous note -and how confident they were in their judgment.…”

“…This means we can predict it with high precision (i.e., with high confidence), given the preceding context of a scale. Later in the movement (after the beginning of the development section), the same passage is modified in a way that the last note of the scale is out of key -and is therefore irregular or improbable given the preceding syntactic context (see also Figure 2 [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54]. In contrast to the classical MMN [28][29][30] -that depends on regularities in ongoing auditory input -the ERAN depends on syntactic knowledge that transcends current auditory sensations.…”

The relationship between acoustic and musical pitch processing in adolescents

“…The overall poor ability of Normal PPs to detect a melodic deviant came as a surprise. Previous work using the same melodies and scoring technique in adults have reported hits minus false alarms accuracy between 35% and 60% for out‐of‐tune notes and 35% and 55% for out‐of‐key notes (Lagrois et al, 2018; Vuvan et al, 2018; Zendel et al, 2015; Zendel & Alexander, 2020). One study explored developmental changes in older adults and found no difference between older and younger adults for the out‐of‐tune note but that older adults were more accurate at detecting out‐of‐key notes compared with younger adults (Lagrois et al, 2018).…”

Autodidacticism and Music: Do Self-Taught Musicians Exhibit the Same Auditory Processing Advantages as Formally Trained Musicians?

“…At the same time, the STmus were just as confident as the FTmus in their ability to do this task. This pattern of results suggests that STmus are less aware of their performance compared to FTmus, as the relationship between accuracy and confidence has been shown to reflect awareness (Zendel et al, 2015a;Vuvan et al, 2018). This reduced awareness could be due to "over confidence" by the STmus, because without formal training STmus were never corrected by a teacher when they made mistakes, and therefore may tend to think they are better at detecting tonal violations then they actually are.…”

“…A set of 40 melodies were used as stimuli for the melody task. This is the same set of melodies that was first used by Brattico et al (2006), have since been used in a variety of music perception studies (e.g., Peretz et al, 2009;Zendel et al, 2015a;Lagrois et al, 2018;Vuvan et al, 2018). All melodies were in a major key and varied in rhythm.…”