Song imitation in congenital amusia: Performance partially facilitated by melody familiarity but not by phonetic content

Abstract

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of pitch perception that may also compromise pitch production. We explored whether vocal imitation of song in amusia is influenced by melody familiarity and phonetic content. Thirteen Mandarin-speaking amusics and 13 matched controls imitated novel song segments with lyrics and on the syllable /la/ while their output was recorded. Eleven out of these participants in each group also imitated segments of a familiar song. Subsequent acoustic analysis was conducted to measure pitch and timing matching accuracy. While amusics’ performance was facilitated by melody familiarity in terms of pitch interval deviation, signed interval deviation and number of contour errors, they showed compromised performance compared to controls in absolute pitch deviation, number of pitch interval errors, duration difference, interonset interval difference, and number of time errors in both familiar and novel song conditions. The presence of lyrics did not affect either group’s performance substantially. While a stronger relationship between music perception and novel melody imitation was observed in amusics as opposed to familiar melody imitation, controls showed the opposite pattern. We discuss the implications of the study in terms of music familiarity, memory demands, the relevance of lexical information and the link between perception and production.

Auditory imagery in congenital amusia

“…A relationship between singing and imagery has been also reported for involuntary musical imagery; better self-rated singing ability and a more frequent habit of singing along to music appear to be linked to longer earworms (Beaman, 2018;Müllensiefen et al, 2014). These findings, considered along with evidence showing impaired singing abilities in amusia (Ayotte et al, 2002;Dalla Bella et al, 2009;Liu et al, 2013;Loutrari et al, 2022;Tremblay-Champoux et al, 2010), lend support to the hypothesis that people with amusia may have an atypical experience of voluntary and involuntary imagery. It is of note that most people with amusia display a normal compensatory response to vocal feedback known as the pitch-shift reflex (Hutchins & Peretz, 2013).…”

“…A few possible explanations hold for the earworm findings. Firstly, there is evidence that people with amusia are able to form long-term music memory traces (Tillmann et al, 2014), which in turn seem to help them imitate familiar song segments better than novel ones (Loutrari et al, 2022). Even if their long-term memory for music is not comparable to that of controls (Graves et al, 2019), it may be good enough to be conducive to some form of earworm experience.…”