Isabelle Peretz

• Université de Montréal

Recognition memory is better for vocal melodies than instrumental melodies. Here we examine whether this vocal advantage extends to recall. Thirty-one violinists learned four melodies (28 notes, 16 s), two produced by voice and two by violin. Their task was to listen to each melody and then immediately sing (for vocal stimuli) or play back on violi...

Since Darwin (1871), researchers have proposed that musicality evolved in a reproductive context in which males produce music to signal their mate quality. The extent to which evidence supports this contention, however, remains unclear. Related traits in many non-human animals are sexually differentiated, and while some sex differences in human aud...

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder that compromises the normal development of musical abilities in 1.5–4% of the general population. There is a substantial genetic contribution to congenital amusia, and it bears similarities to neurodevelopmental disorders of language. Here, we examine the extent to which variants in the forkhead box P2 gene...

Humans spontaneously invent songs from an early age. Here, we exploit this natural inclination to probe implicit musical knowledge in 33 untrained and poor singers (amusia). Each sang 28 long improvisations as a response to a verbal prompt or a continuation of a melodic stem. To assess the extent to which each improvisation reflects tonality, which...

Singing ability is a complex human skill influenced by genetic and environmental factors, the relative contributions of which remain unknown. Currently, genetically informative studies using objective measures of singing ability across a range of tasks are limited. We administered a validated online singing tool to measure performance across three...

Processing auditory sequences involves multiple brain networks and is crucial to complex perception associated with music appreciation and speech comprehension. We used time-resolved cortical imaging in a pitch change detection task to detail the underlying nature of human brain network activity, at the rapid time scales of neurophysiology. In resp...

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; howeve...

The present study introduces a novel tool -- The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Musical Abilities (MBEMA) on tablet -- for assessing musical abilities in 4 to 6-year-old children. The battery contains three tests: melody discrimination, rhythm discrimination and memory recognition of unfamiliar tonal melodies. Each test comprises two examples fo...

Humans spontaneously invent songs from an early age. Here, we exploit this natural inclination to probe implicit musical knowledge in 33 untrained and poor singers (amusia). Each sang 28 long improvisations as a response to a verbal prompt or a continuation of a melodic stem. To assess the extent to which each improvisation reflects tonality, a cor...

IN THIS STUDY, THE ROBUSTNESS OF AN ONLINE tool for objectively assessing singing ability was examined by: (1) determining the internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the tool; (2) comparing the task performance of web-based participants (n  285) with a group (n  52) completing the tool in a controlled laboratory setting, and then det...

The main goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that disorders in entrainment to the beat of music originate from motor deficits. To this aim, we adapted the Beat Alignment Test and tested a large pool of control subjects, as well as nine individuals who had previously showed deficits in synchronization to the beat of music. The tasks consis...

Congenital amusia in its most common form is a disorder characterized by a musical pitch processing deficit. Although pitch is involved in conveying emotion in music, the implications for pitch deficits on musical emotion judgements is still under debate. Relatedly, both limited and spared musical emotion recognition was reported in amusia in condi...

Musical prodigies reach exceptionally high levels of achievement before adolescence. Despite longstanding interest and fascination in musical prodigies, little is known about their psychological profile. Here we assess to what extent practice, intelligence, and personality make musical prodigies a distinct category of musician. Nineteen former or c...

Vocal melodies sung without lyrics (la la) are remembered better than instrumental melodies. What causes the advantage? One possibility is that vocal music elicits subvocal imitation, which could promote enhanced motor representations of a melody. If this motor interpretation is correct, distracting the motor system during encoding should reduce th...

The detection of pitch changes is crucial to sound localization, music appreciation and speech comprehension, yet the brain network oscillatory dynamics involved remain unclear. We used time-resolved cortical imaging in a pitch change detection task. Tone sequences were presented to both typical listeners and participants affected with congenital a...

This study explores how music training impacts the development of inhibition control, phonological processing, and gross and fine motor skills in preschoolers. In a randomized controlled trial, 160 kindergarteners in a music programme, a motor programme, or a control group were examined. Children in the two experimental conditions took part in 19 w...

Humans have the capacity to match movements’ timing with the beat of music. Yet some individuals show marked difficulties. The causes of these difficulties remain to be determined. Here, we investigate to what extend a beat synchronization deficit can be traced to basic timekeeping abilities. Eight beat-impaired individuals who were unable to succe...

Pitch discrimination tasks typically engage the superior temporal gyrus and the right inferior frontal gyrus. It is currently unclear whether these regions are equally involved in the processing of incongruous notes in melodies, which requires the representation of musical structure (tonality) in addition to pitch discrimination. To this aim, 14 pa...

The vast majority of humans move in time with a musical beat. This behaviour has been mostly studied through finger-tapping synchronization. Here, we evaluate naturalistic synchronization responses to music – bouncing and clapping - in 100 university students. Their ability to match the period of their bounces and claps to those of a metronome and...

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 r...

The Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA; Peretz, Champod, & Hyde, 2003) is an empirically-grounded quantitative tool that is widely used to identify individuals with congenital amusia. The use of such a standardized measure ensures that individuals tested conform to a specific neuropsychological profile, allowing for comparisons acr...

A major theme driving research in congenital amusia is related to the modularity of this musical disorder, with two possible sources of the amusic pitch perception deficit. The first possibility is that the amusic deficit is due to a broad disorder of acoustic pitch processing that has the effect of disrupting downstream musical pitch processing, a...

Little empirical research has been conducted on prodigies, in no small part due to the fact that there exists no agreed-upon definition with which to identify them. The most widespread definition characterizes a prodigy as a child who, at a very young age (typically before 10) performs at an adult professional level (Feldman & Goldsmith, 1986). We...

Congenital amusia is a condition in which an individual suffers from a deficit of musical pitch perception and production. Individuals suffering from congenital amusia generally tend to abstain from musical activities. Here, we present the unique case of Tim Falconer, a self-described musicophile who also suffers from congenital amusia. We describe...

Congenital amusia (commonly known as tone deafness) is a lifelong musical disorder that affects 4% of the population according to a single estimate based on a single test from 1980. Here we present the first large-based measure of prevalence with a sample of 20 000 participants, which does not rely on self-referral. On the basis of three objective...

Pitch discrimination is important for language or music processing. Previous studies indicate that auditory perception depends on pre-target neural activity. However, so far the pre-target electrophysiological conditions which enable the detection of small pitch changes are not well studied, but might yield important insights into pitch-processing....

Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategie...

Neural overlap in processing music and speech, as measured by the co-activation of brain regions in neuroimaging studies, may suggest that parts of the neural circuitries established for language may have been recycled during evolution for musicality, or vice versa that musicality served as a springboard for language emergence. Such a perspective h...

Machine learning classification techniques are frequently applied to structural and resting-state fMRI data to identify brain-based biomarkers for developmental disorders. However, task-related fMRI has rarely been used as a diagnostic tool. Here, we used structural MRI, resting-state connectivity and task-based fMRI data to detect congenital amusi...

Experienced musicians outperform non-musicians in understanding speech-in-noise (SPIN). The benefits of lifelong musicianship endure into older age, where musicians experience smaller declines in their ability to understand speech in noisy environments. However, it is presently unknown whether commencing musical training in old age can also counter...

The rhythmic nature of speech may recruit entrainment mechanisms in a manner similar to music. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that individuals who display a severe deficit in synchronizing their taps to a musical beat (called beat-deaf here) would also experience difficulties entraining to speech. The beat-deaf participants and thei...

The present study aimed to measure neural information processing underlying emotional recognition from facial expressions in adults having sustained a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) as compared to healthy individuals. We thus measured early (N1, N170) and later (N2) event-related potential (ERP) components during presentation of fearful, neutra...

It is well known that hearing abilities decline with age, and one of the most commonly reported hearing difficulties reported in older adults is a reduced ability to understand speech in noisy environments. Older adult musicians have an enhanced ability to understand speech in noise, and this has been associated with enhanced brain responses relate...

Background Music has been shown to improve health and quality of life. It was suggested that music may also have an impact on gait stability and fall risk. Yet, few studies have exploited music in the hospital setting, and even less so in the geriatric population. Our objective was to examine the influence of music listening on the risk of falls by...

Aging is associated with cognitive decline and decreased capacity to inhibit distracting information. Video game training holds promise to increase inhibitory mechanisms in older adults. In the current study, we tested the impact of 3D-platform video game training on performance in an antisaccade task and on related changes in grey matter within th...

This study investigated whether there is a co-occurrence between developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia in adults. First, a database of online musical tests on 18,000 participants was analysed. Self-reported dyslexic participants performed significantly lower on melodic skills than matched controls, suggesting a possible link between reading...

Listeners remember vocal melodies better than instrumental melodies, but the origins of the effect are unclear. One explanation for the ‘voice advantage’ is that general perceptual mechanisms enhance processing of conspecific signals. An alternative possibility is that the voice, by virtue of its expressiveness in pitch, simply provides more musica...

The most studied form of congenital amusia is characterized by a difficulty with detecting pitch anomalies in melodies, also referred to as pitch deafness. Here, we tested for the presence of associated deficits in rhythm processing, beat in particular, in pitch deafness. In Experiment 1, participants performed beat perception and production tasks...

Behavioral and neuropsychological studies have suggested that tonal and verbal short-term memory are supported by specialized neural networks. To date however, neuroimaging investigations have failed to confirm this hypothesis. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis of distinct neural resources for tonal and verbal memory by comparing typica...

Cochlear implants can successfully restore hearing in profoundly deaf individuals and enable speech comprehension. However, the acoustic signal provided is severely degraded and, as a result, many important acoustic cues for perceiving emotion in voices and music are unavailable. The deficit of cochlear implant users in auditory emotion processing...

Whether emotions carried by voice and music are processed by the brain using similar mechanisms has long been investigated. Yet neuroimaging studies do not provide a clear picture, mainly due to lack of control over stimuli. Here, we report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using comparable stimulus material in the voice and musi...

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 r...

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Research shows that all humans have a predisposition for music, just as they do for language. All of us can perceive and enjoy music, even if we can't carry a tune and consider ourselves “unmusical.” This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capac...

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Research shows that all humans have a predisposition for music, just as they do for language. All of us can perceive and enjoy music, even if we can't carry a tune and consider ourselves “unmusical.” This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capac...

Aging is associated with decline in both cognitive and auditory abilities. However, evidence suggests that music perception is relatively spared, despite relying on auditory and cognitive abilities that tend to decline with age. It is therefore likely that older adults engage compensatory mechanisms which should be evident in the underlying functio...

Maintaining grey matter within the hippocampus is important for healthy cognition. Playing 3D-platform video games has previously been shown to promote grey matter in the hippocampus in younger adults. In the current study, we tested the impact of 3D-platform video game training (i.e., Super Mario 64) on grey matter in the hippocampus, cerebellum,...

Pre- and post-training scores for the MoCA (a) and short-term memory (b) tasks (*p < 0.05; +/- standard error). (JPG)

Decreased grey matter in the (a) left hippocampus (x = -29, y = -18, z = -24; t = -6.34, p < 0.00005), (b) right hippocampus (x = 31, y = -7.9, z = -27; t = -6.25, p < 0.00005), (c) left cerebellum (x = -5, y = -64, z = -26; t = -8.81, p < 0.00005), (d) right cerebellum (x = 4, y = -67, z = -26; t = -8.10, p < 0.00005) and (e) right DLPCF (x = 34,...

We evaluated the effect of different forms of singing on cardiorespiratory physiology, and we aimed at disentangling the role of breathing from that of vocal production. Cardiorespiratory recordings were obtained from 20 healthy adults at rest and during: a) singing of familiar slow songs as in the standard form of Western culture; b) improvised vo...

Dancing emphasizes the motor expression of emotional experiences. The bodily expression of emotions can modulate the subjective experience of emotions, as when adopting emotion-specific postures and faces. Thus, dancing potentially offers a ground for emotional coping through emotional enhancement and regulation. Here we investigated the emotional...

We investigated whether dancing influences the emotional response to music, compared to when music is listened to in the absence of movement. Forty participants without previous dance training listened to “groovy” and “nongroovy” music excerpts while either dancing or refraining from movement. Participants were also tested while imitating their own...

It is well known that hearing abilities decline with age, and one of the most commonly reported hearing difficulties reported in older adults is a reduced ability to understand speech in noisy environments. Older musicians have an enhanced ability to understand speech in noise, and this has been associated with enhanced brain responses related to b...

The ability to dance relies on the ability to synchronize movements to a perceived musical beat. Typically, beat synchronization is studied with auditory stimuli. However, in many typical social dancing situations, music can also be perceived as vibrations when objects that generate sounds also generate vibrations. This vibrotactile musical percept...

Objectives. Children who use cochlear implants (CIs) have characteristic pitch processing deficits leading to impairments in music perception and in understanding emotional intention in spoken language. Music training for normal hearing (NH) children has previously been shown to benefit perception of emotional prosody. The purpose of the current st...

Pitch discrimination is important for language or music processing. Previous studies indicate that auditory perception depends on pre-target neural activity. However, so far the pre-target electrophysiological conditions which enable the detection of small pitch changes are not well studied, but might yield important insights into pitch-processing....

Supporting methods. (PDF)

Behavioural data. (PDF)

The Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA; Peretz, Champod, & Hyde Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 999, 58-75, 2003) is an empirically grounded quantitative tool that is widely used to identify individuals with congenital amusia. The use of such a standardized measure ensures that the individuals tested will conform to a s...

Methods: In two experiments, young and older adults were required to combine an auditory digit span task and a visuospatial tracking task, for which performance was individually adjusted on each task. In Experiment 1, attentional control skills were measured by instructing participants to deliberately vary attentional priority between the two task...

Congenital amusia (commonly known as tone deafness) is a lifelong musical disorder that affects 4% of the population according to a single estimate based on a single test from 1980. Here we present the first large-based measure of prevalence with a sample of 20 000 participants, which does not rely on self-referral. On the basis of three objective...

LITTLE EMPIRICAL RESEARCH HAS BEEN CONDUCTED on prodigies, in no small part due to the fact that there exists no agreed-upon definition with which to identify them. The most widespread definition characterizes a prodigy as a child who, at a very young age (typically before 10) performs at an adult professional level (Feldman & Goldsmith, 1986). We...

Congenital amusia is a condition in which an individual suffers from a deficit of musical pitch perception and production. Individuals suffering from congenital amusia generally tend to abstain from musical activities. Here, we present the unique case of Tim Falconer, a self-described musicophile who also suffers from congenital amusia. We describe...

The past decade of research has provided compelling evidence that musical engagement is a fundamental human trait, and its biological basis is increasingly scrutinized. In this endeavor, the detailed study of individuals who have musical deficiencies is instructive because of likely neurogenetic underpinnings. Such individuals have ‘congenital amus...

Objectives: To assess emotion recognition from dynamic facial, vocal and musical expressions in sub-groups of adults with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) of different severities and identify possible common underlying mechanisms across domains. Methods: Forty-one adults participated in this study: 10 with moderate–severe TBI, nine with complicated m...

Background: Aphasia challenges the functional communication abilities that people use for everyday social interaction. People with non-fluent aphasia struggle to express themselves when speaking, yet they have been shown to better pronounce words when singing familiar songs or novel songs in a choral context. Choral singing and familiar songs are a...

Normal aging affects explicit memory while leaving implicit memory relatively spared. Normal aging also modifies how emotions are processed and experienced, with increasing evidence that older adults (OAs) focus more on positive information than younger adults (YAs). The aim of the present study was to investigate how age-related changes in emotion...

Congenital amusia (commonly known as tone-deafness) is a lifelong musical disorder that should affect 4% of the population according to a single estimate based on a single test from 1980. Here we present the first large-based measure of prevalence with a sample of 20,000 participants that does not rely on self-referral. On the basis of three object...

The vast majority of humans move in time with a musical beat. This behaviour has been mostly studied through finger-tapping synchronization. Here, we evaluate naturalistic synchronization responses to music-bouncing and clapping-in 100 university students. Their ability to match the period of their bounces and claps to those of a metronome and musi...

Wii set-up. Clapping (left) and bouncing (right) (PDF)

Description of Normal synchronizers' performances. Log-transformed circular variance mean score (standard deviation) for all conditions (Metronome and Merengue averaged). The higher the score the better the performance. The log-transformed coefficient of variation mean score is also provided. (DOCX)

Model specifications for bouncing and clapping synchronization. Prediction of SR by Movement Type and Beat Saliency factors in Normal Synchronizers. (DOCX)

Description of Poor Synchronizers’ performances. A ‘-‘ indicates a failure to match the tempo of at least three (out of six) of the musical trials, or a failure to match the tempo of both metronome trials. A ‘+ /-‘ indicates a failure to match the tempo of one or two of the musical trials or one of the metronome trials. For Spontaneous motor produc...

Both genetic and environmental factors are known to play a role in our ability to perceive music, but the degree to which they influence different aspects of music cognition is still unclear. We investigated the relative contribution of genetic and environmental effects on melody perception in 384 young adult twins [69 full monozygotic (MZ) twin pa...

This study investigated pitch perception and production in speech and music in individuals with congenital amusia (a disorder of musical pitch processing) who are native speakers of Cantonese, a tone language with a highly complex tonal system. Sixteen Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics and 16 controls performed a set of lexical tone perception,...

Pitch discrimination tasks typically engage the superior temporal gyrus and the right inferior frontal gyrus. It is currently unclear whether these regions are equally involved in the processing of incongruous notes in melodies, which requires the representation of musical structure (tonality) in addition to pitch discrimination. To this aim, 14 pa...

Beat deafness, a recently documented form of congenital amusia, provides a unique window into functional specialization of neural circuitry for the processing of musical stimuli: Beat-deaf individuals exhibit deficits that are specific to the detection of a regular beat in music and the ability to move along with a beat. Studies on the neural under...

The current study aims at characterizing the mechanisms that allow humans to entrain the mind and body to incoming rhythmic sensory inputs in real time. We addressed this unresolved issue by examining the relationship between covert neural processes and overt behavior in the context of musical rhythm. We measured temporal prediction abilities, sens...

Recent theories suggest that the basis of neurodevelopmental auditory disorders such as dyslexia or specific language impairment might be a low-level sensory dysfunction. In the present study we test this hypothesis in congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by severe deficits in the processing of pitch-based material. We man...