[blindza] FW: High notes really are high.
- From: "Jacob Kruger" <jacobk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "BlindZA" <blindza@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:02:07 +0200
This probably means two things:
Tone deaf people might have trouble navigating without seeing, and
Don't 'listen to music while navigating 'blind' - LOL!
Comments?
Jacob Kruger
Blind Biker
---original message---
High notes really are high.
Perception of pitch and spatial orientation are linked.
Kerri Smith.
The way that people talk about 'high' and 'low' notes makes it sound as
though musical pitch has something to do with physical location. Now it
seems there may be a reason for this: the same bit of our brain could
control both our understanding of pitch and spatial orientation.
The result comes from a study of tone-deaf people - also known as 'amusics'
- which shows that they have poorer spatial skills than those who have no
problem distinguishing between two musical notes.
Amusics are unable to tell whether a particular musical note is higher or
lower than another. The condition has puzzled neuroscientists, because the
way in which the brains of amusics process auditory information seems to be
no different from normal.
Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand were keen to
investigate. David Bilkey and his student Katie Douglas (who, as a member
of the New Zealand Youth Choir, is particularly interested in how the brain
processes music) had noticed that music is often described using spatial
references, such as 'high' and 'low' notes - with higher notes literally
sitting higher on a stave. The same is true in many different languages.
So they decided to test the spatial skills of amusic people.
"The question was whether the relationship was just a metaphor or something
more than that," says Bilkey.
He and Douglas asked volunteers to mentally rotate an object, and click on
a picture of how it would look when rotated. Amusic subjects made more than
twice as many errors than either of the two control groups - one made up of
musicians, the other a group with little musical training. The results are
reported in Nature Neuroscience.
"We were really surprised. The hypothesis that spatial processing was the
underlying problem was a long shot," Bilkey says. Most studies of amusia
have focused on pitch processing as the fundamental deficit, says Tim
Griffiths, a neurologist at Newcastle University in the UK.
In chorus.
The researchers went on to see if their volunteers could perform both
tasks - pitch discrimination and object rotation - at the same time.
The control groups found this hard, and took much longer to mentally rotate
objects when they also had to discriminate between two notes. This is
presumably because the tasks interfered with each other. "One possibility
is that pitch is encoded in parts of the brain that also encode spatial
information," suggests Bilkey. This would increase the workload for these
brain regions in normal people, slowing them down.
But amusic subjects were much less affected by having to do these tasks
simultaneously. Because they were pretty much unable to tell the musical
notes apart, their brain was free to work on the spatial task.
One brain region that might be doing the work is an area in the parietal
lobe called the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), says Bilkey, which is known to
be involved in processing music, spatial information and numbers.
Space training.
Given the relationship between amusia and spatial skill, does this mean
that improving one might boost the other? The researchers don't yet know.
It has been previously shown that people with many years of musical
training are better at spatial tasks, Bilkey says. But it's not clear how
this relationship works, or what causes what.
So it's unknown whether wannabe musicians would benefit from rotating
shapes in their heads. Or whether amusic people would benefit from spatial
skills training. Griffiths has met many amusics, and is sceptical. "I'm not
sure if auditory training would help people, let alone spatial training,"
he says.
Nature Neuroscience:
Amusia is associated with deficits in spatial processing.
By Katie M Douglas and David K Bilkey.
Abstract.
Amusia (commonly referred to as tone-deafness) is a difficulty in
discriminating pitch changes in melodies that affects around 4% of
the human population. Amusia cannot be explained as a simple sensory
impairment. Here we show that amusia is strongly related to a deficit
in spatial processing in adults. Compared to two matched control
groups (musicians and non-musicians), participants in the amusic
group were significantly impaired on a visually presented mental
rotation task. Amusic subjects were also less prone to interference
in a spatial stimulus-response incompatibility task and performed
significantly faster than controls in an interference task in which
they were required to make simple pitch discriminations while
concurrently performing a mental rotation task. This indicates that
the processing of pitch in music normally depends on the cognitive
mechanisms that are used to process spatial representations in other
modalities.
Source URLs:
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070618/full/070618-18.html
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn1925.html
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