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. 2023 May 1;35(5):765-780.
doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01973.

Consonance Perception in Congenital Amusia: Behavioral and Brain Responses to Harmonicity and Beating Cues

Affiliations

Consonance Perception in Congenital Amusia: Behavioral and Brain Responses to Harmonicity and Beating Cues

Jackson E Graves et al. J Cogn Neurosci. .

Abstract

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in the perception and production of music, including the perception of consonance and dissonance, or the judgment of certain combinations of pitches as more pleasant than others. Two perceptual cues for dissonance are inharmonicity (the lack of a common fundamental frequency between components) and beating (amplitude fluctuations produced by close, interacting frequency components). Amusic individuals have previously been reported to be insensitive to inharmonicity, but to exhibit normal sensitivity to beats. In the present study, we measured adaptive discrimination thresholds in amusic participants and found elevated thresholds for both cues. We recorded EEG and measured the MMN in evoked potentials to consonance and dissonance deviants in an oddball paradigm. The amplitude of the MMN response was similar overall for amusic and control participants; however, in controls, there was a tendency toward larger MMNs for inharmonicity than for beating cues, whereas the opposite tendency was observed for the amusic participants. These findings suggest that initial encoding of consonance cues may be intact in amusia despite impaired behavioral performance, but that the relative weight of nonspectral (beating) cues may be increased for amusic individuals.

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Figures

<b>Figure 1.</b>
Figure 1.
Stimuli manipulating harmonicity and beating cues. Temporal waveforms and frequency spectra of stimuli for harmonicity (left) and beating (right) conditions, with vertical dashed lines showing the first, second, third, fifth, and ninth components in a harmonic series. Harmonic complexes (A) contained the five components shown, with a decaying spectral envelope. Inharmonic complexes (B) were shifted up relative to harmonic complexes by a uniform distance in linear frequency. No-beating stimuli (C) were inharmonic, with frequency components jittered relative to a harmonic series. Beating stimuli (D) introduced a single sideband component 30 Hz above or below each component in the no-beating stimuli, with a uniform level difference between sidebands and original components. (E) shows the timing of a trial on the 3AFC discrimination task used in Experiment 1. Participants identified the target (red) by comparing against two references (blue), with target position randomized on each trial.
<b>Figure 2.</b>
Figure 2.
Behavioral results for discrimination of harmonicity and beating cues by amusic and control participants. Top: thresholds measured with 3AFC adaptive tracking (Experiment 1) for inharmonic shift (harmonicity, A) and single sideband depth (beating, B), for controls (green, n = 11) and amusics (purple, n = 12). Dashed lines indicate levels chosen for the constant-stimuli oddball paradigm in the EEG study. Error bars show ±1 SEM. Individual thresholds are shown in (C).
<b>Figure 3.</b>
Figure 3.
Oddball paradigm with consonance changes and pitch roving. Participants heard deviant (red) and standard (blue) stimuli in four different experimental conditions. Nominal F0 varied constantly, with a minimum distance of one semitone between each pair of two consecutive tones. Each of the four stimulus types (harmonic, inharmonic, no-beating, and beating) served as the deviant in one condition, with its contrast serving as the standard. Left: sound spectra for IDEV (A) and HDEV (B) conditions; dashed gray lines indicate harmonic partials. Right: sound waveforms for BDEV (C) and NDEV (D) conditions, plotted at the level of their fundamental frequency (F0). In the BDEV and NDEV conditions, all sounds were inharmonic.
<b>Figure 4.</b>
Figure 4.
Behavioral results during the active task of Experiment 2. Behavioral sensitivity (d′) for identifying deviants is plotted for the harmonicity contrast (A) with an inharmonic deviant (IDEV) or a harmonic deviant (HDEV), and for the beating contrast (B) with a beating deviant (BDEV) or a no-beating deviant (NDEV), for control (n = 21) and amusic (n = 19) groups. Chance performance corresponds to a d′ of 0. Individual performance for IDEV and BDEV is shown in (C).
<b>Figure 5.</b>
Figure 5.
ERPs to standard and deviant stimuli at Fz by group and condition. Responses are shown at electrode Fz for each of the four types of stimulus, for controls (top row) and amusics (bottom row). Each plot compares a deviant to its acoustically identical standard (the same sound in a different context from the opposite condition). Blue and red colored regions show ±1 SEM. Gray regions indicate significant MMN across all participants, observed for harmonic and no-beating sounds. Orange regions indicate significant P3a across all participants, observed for harmonic sounds.
<b>Figure 6.</b>
Figure 6.
Topography of MMN and P3a responses to consonant stimuli. The difference amplitude (deviant minus standard) across the scalp is shown, averaged over two time periods: 150–300 msec (MMN, odd columns) and 300–450 msec (P3a, even columns), for harmonic sounds (left) and no-beating sounds (right), for controls (top) and amusics (bottom). Small black dots indicate electrode positions. See Figure S2 for the topographies of nonsignificant responses for dissonant deviants.
<b>Figure 7.</b>
Figure 7.
MMN amplitude and difference waves by group and condition. Difference waves at Fz are plotted for controls (green) and amusics (purple) in each condition (A–D). Purple and green colored regions show ±1 SEM. Shaded gray regions in (A) and (C) show significant MMN at Fz across groups in response to harmonic and no-beating stimuli, whereas dashed gray rectangles in (B) and (D) show these same clusters for comparison for inharmonic and beating sounds, where no MMN was observed. The shaded orange region in (A) shows a significant P3a for harmonic stimuli, whereas the dashed orange rectangles in (B–D) show this same cluster for comparison for other sounds where no P3a was observed. (E) shows mean MMN amplitude, averaged within the relevant spatiotemporal cluster for each group and condition. Error bars show ±1 SEM. For harmonic and no-beating stimuli, averages were computed in the cluster for that stimulus across both groups. As no significant clusters were identified for dissonant stimuli, inharmonic and beating stimuli borrowed the clusters for harmonic and no-beating stimuli, respectively. (F) is as (E), but for P3a amplitude, with other sounds borrowing the cluster for harmonic stimuli.

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