The relationship between acoustic and musical pitch processing in adolescents

Abstract

Amusia is defined as a difficulty processing the tonal pitch structure of music such that an individual cannot tell the difference between notes that are in‐key and out‐of‐key. A fine‐grained pitch discrimination deficit is often observed in people with amusia. It is possible that an intervention, early in development, could mitigate amusia; however, one challenge identifying amusia early in development is that identifying in‐ and out‐of‐key notes is a metacognitive task. Given the common co‐occurrence of difficulties with pitch discrimination, it would be easier to identify amusia in developing children by using a pitch change detection task. The goal of this study was to explore the behavioural and neurophysiological profiles of adolescents with poor pitch processing (Poor PP) abilities compared with those with normal pitch processing (Normal PP) abilities. Neurophysiologically, the Poor PPs exhibited a similar event‐related potential (ERP) profile to adult amusics during both acoustic and musical pitch discrimination tasks. That is, early ERPs (ERAN, MMN) were similar in Poor PPs compared with Normal PPs, whereas late positivities (P300, P600) were absent in Poor PPs, but present in Normal PPs. At the same time, behavioural data revealed a double dissociation between the abilities to detect a pitch deviant in acoustic and musical context, suggesting that about a third of the children would be missed by selecting a fine‐grained acoustic pitch discrimination task to identify the presence of amusia in early childhood.

Relationship between early neural responses to syntactic and acoustic irregularities in music

“…Several studies have reported that a late positive potential, P600, is elicited after the ERAN when participants are asked to detect out‐of‐key or out‐of‐tune notes (Lagrois et al, 2018; Peretz et al, 2009; Zendel et al, 2022; Zendel & Alexander, 2020). Similarly to the N5, the P600 is also thought to reflect the integration of a violated tone into the tonal context, and both potentials are observed around 400–600 ms (N5: Koelsch et al, 2007; Zhang et al, 2018; P600: Lagrois et al, 2018; Zendel et al, 2022; Zendel & Alexander, 2020). Although both components may have a similar function, Koelsch (2011) discussed that the N5 may also reflect the processing of intramusical meaning.…”