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Poster A71, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall

The effect of melody training on brain responses in Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics: Evidence from Event-related Potentials

Jing Shao1,2, Yubin Zhang1, Caicai Zhang1;1The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Science

Congenital amusia (amusia hereafter) is an inborn pitch disorder. Individuals with amusia show deficits in pitch processing in both music and language domains. Regarding whether intervention could remedy the behavioural symptoms of amusia, some findings suggested null/limited effect of training through daily music listening or vocal training, while some other findings suggested that amusics improved their pitch processing abilities behaviourally after targeted and explicit training. However, at the neural level, whether the amusics’ brain responses to melodies could be reshaped remains unclear. To better understand the neuroplasticity of the amusic brain, we examined the event-related potentials (ERPs) in 12 Cantonese-speaking amusics before and after melody training and also tested 12 matched controls. During the six training sessions, participants heard identical and different melody pairs. In the different pairs, a single tone was detuned from what it is in its counterpart by five scales (2, 1.5, 1, 0.5 and 0.25 semitone). Each melody was simultaneously accompanied by a visual contour, which is congruent with the pitch contour. Prior to and after the training, ERPs were recorded during the deviant pitch sequence detection presented in the piano timbre. There were two kinds of sequences: “standard” and “deviant”. The “standard” sequences were composed of five standard tones. In the “deviant” sequence, the first three notes were standard tones, followed by a deviant tone and a standard tone. The standard tone was played at a pitch level of C6. The rare deviant tones were either lower or higher in pitch than the standard tone by 25, 50 or 100 cents. According to previous findings that the amusic brain was impaired in consciously processing small pitch differences, we predicted that in the pre-test, the P3 amplitude elicited in the amusic brain should be reduced compared with controls, especially in the small pitch deviation conditions (25/50 cents). If melody discrimination training could significantly influence the amusic’ brain responses to the musical pitch, the P3 activities elicited by the deviant tone should be stronger in the post-test than the pre-test. The behavioural results demonstrated that after melody discrimination training, the amusics improved significantly in the detection of deviants in the 25 cents condition, suggesting the effect of training at the behavioural level. The ERPs results showed that in the pre-test, the P3 amplitude elicited by the amusic group was significantly smaller than the control group. While in the post-test, the group difference between amusics and controls was diminished, implying that after training, the neural activities in the amusic brain became similar to controls. Our results were the first to report that with targeted melody discrimination training, the neural activities in the amusics could be significantly improved, which suggests that the amusic brain has the plasticity for learning in the music domain.

Themes: Perception: Auditory, Prosody
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)

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