Amusia is a neurological disorder and is a type of agnosia, that is, the loss of the ability to recognize the brain stimuli that arrive. In this case, the stimuli are the musical sounds and what is lost is the musical ability. A person suffering from amusia cannot discriminate the basic characteristics of a note or series of musical notes and nuances, and even in the most extreme cases, individuals cannot differentiate between sounds of different hue.
Being in a bar with everyone dancing around you and not being able to tell what song is playing. Although it seems incredible, there are people who cannot differentiate the tones. When they actually listen to music for them, only a shrill sound is heard and they cannot tell one melody from another.
As in the case of aphasias (loss of the ability to produce or understand language), amusia is not due to an alteration in the auditory system itself, but comes from the central system, that is, the brain.
There are many types of amusia, almost as many as musical components, and they are not easy to detect since they are so frequent that they are often not associated with neurological disorders but with a lack of musical studies. However, despite this great variety, we can mainly distinguish three types: sensory, motor and mixed.
- The motor: they are characterized by the loss of the ability to carry out some motor activity.
- Vocal amusia: consists of the loss of the ability to sing whistles and buzzes.
- Instrumental amusia: loss of ability to play an instrument.
- Musical Agrafia: It is the inability to transcribe a series of notes or copy a musical notation.
- Musical amnesia: it is characterized by the difficulty that the patient has to differentiate a song that he must know.
- The musical alexia: inability to read music notation.
- Rhythm sense disorders: Difficulty discriminating or producing rhythmic patterns.
- Receptive amusia: difficulty discriminating the basic characteristics of a note or series of notes. The extreme case is the inability to differentiate between sounds of different tonality and can be accompanied by an unpleasant sensation when listening to music.
As in almost all brain activities, various parts of it are involved in this musical perception. Therefore, the pitch, timbre, rhythm, melody, and emotional response caused by music could have different brain locations
