The Rhythm of Life

Have you ever wondered why some people can sing amazingly while others are completely tone deaf? And why some people can dance and others can't tap their foot to a beat? Well, I have. Just this week. And I decided to find out why we have such extremes of singers and dancers, and what it is that separates singers like Adele from the deluded individuals we see on the X-factor. And I found some interesting stuff along the way.

Musical competence develops in us spontaneously when we are children without any conscious effort - in the same way as language does. But also in the same way as language impairments, a proportion of individuals grow up to have music-specific impairments. Congenital amusia is the term used for the condition where some people are born without the ability to develop a normally functioning system for music. There are different types and extremes of amusias – for example some can result from brain damage in adulthood.

So what is amusia? Well this is a severe deficiency in processing pitch variations, which relates to impairments in music recognition, singing and the ability to tap in time to music. This can be more than our common understanding of the term 'tone-deafness', used for those who can’t sing on key, as people with the worst cases of amusia can neither produce or perceive music in any way, being unable to distinguish songs. Interestingly, this is completely specific to the area of music, with individuals being completely able to process speech, environmental sounds, voices and language like any other. And surprisingly, this 'condition' affects around 4% of the human population – but of course to differing extremes. 

So what are the basic causes of this amusia? Well genetics as ever plays a huge role, but there has been no specific gene linked to amusia at present. A more recent study has linked amusia to an area of the brain, known as the arcuate fasiculus (or AF). The AF is known to be involved in language, and connects the sound perception and production with each other. This study found tone-dead people had reduced AF connectivity, and hence had pitch-related impairments due to the inability to link sound perception and production in the brain.

There are many conflicting studies relating to the area of amusia, and the ways in which amusia prevents people from being able to perceive/produce music. People with amusia may suffer from a problem with recognition of their music – how they hear themselves may be different to how we hear it. Another reason for such terrible tunes is due to a problem with the voice itself. A person can have poor control over their vocal system – so even if they hear and recognize a musical note, they are unable to reproduce it. Some studies have also questioned memory in relation to this – would remembering the pitch sequences of songs be harder for some, making it difficult to reproduce themselves? Amusia is also linked to the lack of ability to keep in time to music – making some people less able to dance in time than others, impairing their rhythm.

So that explains why some people just cannot sing, and no doubt research in the field will continue so one day we will have a much clearer picture. As for the question of why others can sing so incredibly well? There is no specific reason for this – some people are just born with it, and although I’m sure going to the BRIT school helped artists like Adele, Jessie J and Rizzle Kicks control their voices and develop their talents, they still would have been able to blast out a good tune none the less…lucky sods.

References
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070823214755.htm
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/2/238.long
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4655352.stm
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/33/10215