Music-specific disorders

Neuroscientists have learned a lot about the role of the brain in numerous cognitive mechanisms by understanding corresponding disorders. Similarly, neuroscientists have come to learn a lot about music cognition by studying music-specific disorders. Even though music is most often viewed from a "historical perspective rather than a biological one" music has significantly gained the attention of neuroscientists all around the world. For many centuries music has been strongly associated with art and culture. The reason for this increased interest in music is because it "provides a tool to study numerous aspects of neuroscience, from motor skill learning to emotion".

An important technique that is used by neuroscientists in understanding the cognition of music involves understanding musical disorders. This article describes some of the disorders that have been identified by neuroscientists. They range from disorders involving pitch, rhythm and melody, playing instruments and creating music. This article explores two of the most commonly found music related disorders—(1)

Before delving into the disorders related to music, it is important to have a basic understanding of the following terms:

In the physical sense of the term, the word "pitch" refers to the frequency of a sound. Another term that is frequently used by music neuroscientists is "fine-grained pitch processing" which refers to the ability of a person to distinguish minor changes or fluctuations in pitch. Processing pitch is an extremely integral part of music cognition. Recent developments in brain scanning techniques have shown neuroscientists that the posterior secondary cortex plays an extremely important part in the processing of pitch in the brain. In music, "pitch relation" is more important than pitch itself. A subset of five to seven pitches creates a scale. The scale tones are "not equivalent and are organized around a central tone, called the tonic" (Peretz 2005).

Temporal organization of music is commonly referred to as "rhythm". In 1982 the neuroscientist Fraisse claimed that there are mainly two types of time relations that are fundamental to musical temporal organization: (1) "the segmentation of an ongoing sequence into temporal groups" based on the duration values (in musical terms a whole, half, quarter, eighth or sixteenth note), and (2) "extraction of an underlying temporal regularity or beat".

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