Tonality Perpection In Mandarin-Speaking Congenial Amusics

Congenital amusia is a kind of musical pitch processing disorder, commonly known as tone deaf. Amusia can not distinguish subtle differences between two adjacent tones, singing out of tune but unaware. This defect is neither due to brain damage, hearing loss, cognitive or social emotional disorder, nor due to lack of contact with the music (such as musical training, music listening tours, etc.). According to reports, the British biologist Darwin, USA former president Roosevelt are congenital amusia.So, Research on amusia’s pitch processing disorder of music, not only to Provide a reference for amusia’s clinical rehabilitation, but also promote the comparative study of music and language, which is also the main reason for the international academic attention to the amusia. Processing disorder of amusia are mainly on not only in the performance of the musical pitch perception and memory, and it has been extended to the field of speech, influence on their emotional speech prosody, and semantic understanding. Remarkably tonality can promote people’s perception and memory for music.whether amusia’s processing disorder in music is caused by the disorder of pitch processing, or by the tonal processing disorder? Based on this, this study attempts to explore the amusia’s tonal processing capacity, on this basis, further explorating of amusia’s music perception and memor of atonaly and tonality.This research consists of four experiments. The first one explored the amusia’s perception ability of tonality. Results found in normal subjects is, their evaluation of the scale grade stability show level trend. However, amusia’s assessment of these tone scale does not show level trends, Indicate that amusia’s atonality stability is significantly lower than normal subjects. In experiment two, we investigate amusia’s processing capacity of harmony rules in diatonic chords sequence. The results show that, in normal subjects can distinguish the regulate and irregulate chord sequence.but, amusia’s assessment of chord sequences of these two conditions do not have the difference. These results suggest that, amusia’s processing of diatonic chord may have obstacles. Experiment three and four examined amusia’s discrimination and memory of tonal and atonal melody. The results found that, amusia are inferior to the normal subjects both in these two conditions of tonal and atonal melodies. The results of this study suggest that, amusia’s music processing disorder are not only due to their musical pitch perception difficulties, but also because they have difficulty in tonaliy processing.