3rdgensooner
3/11/2011, 04:07 PM
Beat Deafness: A Man Lost in Musical Time (http://news.discovery.com/human/music-beat-deafness-rhythm-110304.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1)
Everyone has a friend that dances to their own rhythm -- and no one else's. Now researchers have a theory why that is.
THE GIST
Researchers have identified the first documented case of beat deafness.
When music is playing, a 23-year-old man named Mathieu flails in a time zone of his own when bouncing up and down to a melody.
Mathieu usually fails to recognize when someone else dances out of sync to a tune, too.
The Go-Go's had a 1982 hit record with "We Got the Beat," but a 23-year-old man named Mathieu never got their message. Researchers have identified Mathieu as the first documented case of beat deafness, a condition in which a person can't feel music's beat or move in time to it.
Mathieu flails in a time zone of his own when bouncing up and down to a melody, unlike people who don't dance particularly well but generally move in sync with a musical beat, according to a team led by psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Isabelle Peretz, both of the University of Montreal. What's more, Mathieu usually fails to recognize when someone else dances out of sync to a tune, the researchers report in a paper that will appear in Neuropsychologia.
"We suspect that beat deafness is specific to music and is quite rare," Phillips-Silver says. She and her colleagues plan to investigate whether Mathieu takes an offbeat approach to nonmusical activities, such as conversational turn-taking and adjusting one's gait to that of someone else.
Language lacks the periodic rhythms found in music, so it's unlikely that Mathieu's problem affects speech perception, remarks cognitive scientist Josh McDermott of New York University. If periodic sounds of all kinds confuse Mathieu, this problem may loom large when he confronts complex musical beats, McDermott suggests.
Everyone has a friend that dances to their own rhythm -- and no one else's. Now researchers have a theory why that is.
THE GIST
Researchers have identified the first documented case of beat deafness.
When music is playing, a 23-year-old man named Mathieu flails in a time zone of his own when bouncing up and down to a melody.
Mathieu usually fails to recognize when someone else dances out of sync to a tune, too.
The Go-Go's had a 1982 hit record with "We Got the Beat," but a 23-year-old man named Mathieu never got their message. Researchers have identified Mathieu as the first documented case of beat deafness, a condition in which a person can't feel music's beat or move in time to it.
Mathieu flails in a time zone of his own when bouncing up and down to a melody, unlike people who don't dance particularly well but generally move in sync with a musical beat, according to a team led by psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Isabelle Peretz, both of the University of Montreal. What's more, Mathieu usually fails to recognize when someone else dances out of sync to a tune, the researchers report in a paper that will appear in Neuropsychologia.
"We suspect that beat deafness is specific to music and is quite rare," Phillips-Silver says. She and her colleagues plan to investigate whether Mathieu takes an offbeat approach to nonmusical activities, such as conversational turn-taking and adjusting one's gait to that of someone else.
Language lacks the periodic rhythms found in music, so it's unlikely that Mathieu's problem affects speech perception, remarks cognitive scientist Josh McDermott of New York University. If periodic sounds of all kinds confuse Mathieu, this problem may loom large when he confronts complex musical beats, McDermott suggests.