Understanding Tone Deafness
By HSS Communications Office

Perception of speech and music is known to rely, to some extent, on shared brain resources, but the degree to which these resources are shared, and how they are orchestrated is not known.

To expand our understanding of these matters, Asst Prof Alice Chan from the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, and a team of researchers from Northwestern University, have been awarded a National Science Foundation Grant, worth US$434,472 to research on Musical and Lexical Tone Deafness.

The central objective of the research is to explore what tone deafness reveals about speech and music.

"If the brain resources required to perceive tone are shared between speech and music," explained Asst Prof Chan. "Then speakers who suffer from tone deafness should show difficulty in perceiving and producing tones – in both speech and music."

The three-year project, involving participants of different linguistic backgrounds in Singapore and in the US, will expand our understanding about the organisation of music and speech processing by the human nervous system, via multimodal state-ofthe-art brain imaging methods, as well as functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Findings from the research can possibly lead to clinical applications for treatment. As tone deafness is not classified as a disorder by any medical group, its impact has yet to be documented, and treatment research has not begun.

"We hope that this research will give us a better understanding of communicative consequences of tone deafness, and ultimately lead to clinical recognition and treatment," said Asst Prof Chan.