title: Impairments in musical abilities reflected in the auditory brainstem: evidence from congenital amusia.
abstract: Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic condition, characterized by a deficit in music perception and production, not explained by hearing loss, brain damage or lack of exposure to music. Despite inferior musical performance, amusics exhibit normal auditory cortical responses, with abnormal neural correlates suggested to lie beyond auditory cortices. Here we show, using auditory brainstem responses to complex sounds in humans, that fine-grained automatic processing of sounds is impoverished in amusia. Compared with matched non-musician controls, spectral amplitude was decreased in amusics for higher harmonic components of the auditory brainstem response. We also found a delayed response to the early transient aspects of the auditory stimulus in amusics. Neural measures of spectral amplitude and response timing correlated with participants' behavioral assessments of music processing. We demonstrate, for the first time, that amusia affects how complex acoustic signals are processed in the auditory brainstem. This neural signature of amusia mirrors what is observed in musicians, such that the aspects of the auditory brainstem responses that are enhanced in musicians are degraded in amusics. By showing that gradients of music abilities are reflected in the auditory brainstem, our findings have implications not only for current models of amusia but also for auditory functioning in general.
authors.affiliation: International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), Center for Research on Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM), Pavillon 1420, Montreal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada.|Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada.|Department of Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Alexandre
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lehmann
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA.|Department of Psychology Affiliate, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA.|Cognitive Science Affiliate, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA.
authors.forename: Erika
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Skoe
authors.affiliation: International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), Center for Research on Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM), Pavillon 1420, Montreal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada.|Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Moreau
authors.affiliation: International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), Center for Research on Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM), Pavillon 1420, Montreal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada.|Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Peretz
authors.affiliation: Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.|Department of Communication Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.|Department of Neurobiology and Physiology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.|Department of Otolaryngology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Nina
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kraus
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000368:Aged; D001308:Auditory Perceptual Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001933:Brain Stem / Q000503:physiopathology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009146:Music
keywords: auditory system plasticity; cABR; human brainstem; music experience; tone-deafness