Discrimination and recognition of tonal melodies after unilateral cerebral excisions

doi:10.1016/0028-3932(85)90041-7

Neuropsychologia

Volume 23, Issue 1, 1985, Pages 31-41

https://doi.org/10.1016/0028-3932(85)90041-7 Get rights and content

Abstract

Groups of surgical patients with unilateral temporal- or frontal-lobe lesions and normal control subjects were tested in melodic discrimination and recognition tasks. The discrimination task required detection of a single-note change in a pair of short unfamiliar tonal melodies. The altered note either violated or preserved the contour, the scale, or both, of the original melody. Recognition required that the melodies used in the discrimination task be recognized from among a set of similar foils. Right temporal-lobe patients performed most poorly in discrimination. Further analysis showed that excision of the primary auditory receiving area. Heschl's gyri from either side resulted in a deficit which was independent from, but additive with, the deficit caused by right temporal lobectomy. In the recognition task, both temporal-lobe groups were impaired as compared to control. The use of scale and contour cues was similar for all groups, indicating that the deficits observed are not attributable to failure to process one of these cues. Right frontal-lobe lesioned patients differed from the others in response bias, but performed as well as controls on both tasks. The results are interpreted as evidence for two processes in melodic discrimination, one due to short-term memory mechanisms, the other attributable to a deficit in processing complex auditory patterns.

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Cited by (148)

Retained absolute pitch after selective amygdalohippocampectomy
2020, Epilepsy and Behavior Reports
Citation Excerpt :
After surgery, however, the only area that showed statistically significant activation was in the left angular gyrus, which showed no significant activation before surgery. In the literature, a variety of brain areas were associated with music pitch processing in people without AP [24]; the posterior portion of the right and left superior temporal gyrus [25,26], right Heschl's gyrus [27], left and right superior temporal gyrus and planum polare [28], and the anterior portion of the right superior temporal gyrus [29]. The processing of the harmonic aspect of music is related to bilateral frontal regions, such as the inferior frontal gyrus, frontal operculum, and insula [30,31].
This study assessed the pre-operative chronic condition and effect of epilepsy surgery in a 21-year-old Japanese woman with drug-resistant right temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). For this patient, it was crucially important to preserve language and her music capabilities, including absolute pitch (AP), which is found in the general population at less than 0.1%. The patient became seizure free, and her AP capability was preserved after selective amygdalohippocampectomy in the non-dominant right hemisphere. Most of the neuropsychological test (WAIS-III and WMS-R) scores remained in the normal range, except for low scores in verbal memory and markedly improved attention/concentration index. The patient's pre- and postoperative brain function related to language and music capabilities were investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based on two language tasks and a music task (listening to melodies). While task performance was similar in pre- and postoperative examinations, her brain activation patterns markedly differed. The most striking difference was during the music task: areas with significant activation existed in the bilateral frontal and temporal lobes before surgery, whereas postoperative activation was confined to a very limited region in the left angular gyrus. The authors speculate that the surgery triggered some change in functional organization in the brain, which contributed to preserving her capabilities.
Musical, visual and cognitive deficits after middle cerebral artery infarction
2017, eNeurologicalSci
Citation Excerpt :
Impairments of music perception are widely reported in the literature [2,30,32,41,55], and can occur after lesions to temporal, frontal, and parietal areas [4,10,11,18,25,35,39,40,44–47,50], but also after subcortical lesions [19]. These patient studies showed a double dissociation between melody [18,36,47,59] and rhythm perception [10,36,47,56]. Melody perception refers to the perception of pitch height, intervals and the contour of a melody (e.g. whether the melody is ascending or descending in pitch).
The perception of music can be impaired after a stroke. This dysfunction is called amusia and amusia patients often also show deficits in visual abilities, language, memory, learning, and attention. The current study investigated whether deficits in music perception are selective for musical input or generalize to other perceptual abilities. Additionally, we tested the hypothesis that deficits in working memory or attention account for impairments in music perception. Twenty stroke patients with small infarctions in the supply area of the middle cerebral artery were investigated with tests for music and visual perception, categorization, neglect, working memory and attention. Two amusia patients with selective deficits in music perception and pronounced lesions were identified. Working memory and attention deficits were highly correlated across the patient group but no correlation with musical abilities was obtained. Lesion analysis revealed that lesions in small areas of the putamen and globus pallidus were connected to a rhythm perception deficit. We conclude that neither a general perceptual deficit nor a minor domain general deficit can account for impairments in the music perception task. But we find support for the modular organization of the music perception network with brain areas specialized for musical functions as musical deficits were not correlated to any other impairment.
Music and its association with epileptic disorders
2015, Progress in Brain Research
The association between music and epileptic seizures is complex and intriguing. Musical processing within the human brain recruits a network which involves many cortical areas that could activate as part of a temporal lobe seizure or become hyperexcitable on musical exposure as in the case of musicogenic epilepsy. The dichotomous effect of music on seizures may be explained by modification of dopaminergic circuitry or counteractive cognitive and sensory input in ictogenesis. Research has explored the utility of music as a therapy in epilepsy and while limited studies show some evidence of an effect on seizure activity; further work is required to ascertain its clinical potential. Sodium channel-blocking antiepileptic drugs, e.g., carbamazepine and oxcarbazepine, appear to effect pitch perception particularly in native-born Japanese, a rare but important adverse effect, particularly if a professional musician. Temporal lobe surgery for right lateralizing epilepsy has the capacity to effect all facets of musical processing, although risk and correlation to resection area need further research. There is a need for the development of investigative tools of musical processing that could be utilized along the surgical pathway. Similarly, work is also required in devising a musical paradigm as part of electroencephalography to improve surveillance of musicogenic seizures. These clinical applications could aid the management of epilepsy and preservation of musical ability.
Acquired amusia
2015, Handbook of Clinical Neurology
Citation Excerpt :
Of interest, these studies further indicate that individual patients with semantic dementia may show relatively preserved melody recognition despite impairments in other semantic domains, including environmental sounds, consistent with the evidence of single case studies (Hailstone et al., 2009b; Omar et al., 2010; Weinstein et al., 2011). On balance, while there is neuroanatomic evidence suggesting that associative agnosia for melodies results from left-sided or bi-hemispheric damage while apperceptive agnosia for melodies results from damage to the right hemisphere (Zatorre, 1985; Eustache et al., 1990; Ayotte et al., 2000), as predicted by classic models of object agnosia in other domains, neuroanatomic correlations of melody agnosia are less clear than for other forms of agnosia (Hsieh et al., 2011; Johnson et al., 2011). While it is likely that methodologic variation between studies is playing a part, there is clearly interdependence between associative and putative apperceptive processes, and anatomic attributions must remain tentative (Fig. 34.3).
Recent developments in the cognitive neuroscience of music suggest that a further review of the topic of amusia is timely. In this chapter, we first consider previous taxonomies of amusia and propose a fresh framework for understanding the amusias, essentially as disorders of cognitive information processing. We critically review current cognitive and neuroanatomic findings in the published literature on amusia. We assess the extent to which the clinical and neuropsychologic evidence in amusia can be reconciled; both with the information-processing framework we propose, and with the picture of the brain organization of music and language processing emerging from cognitive neuroscience and functional neuroimaging studies. The balance of evidence suggests that the amusias can be understood as disorders of musical object cognition targeting separable levels of an information-processing hierarchy and underpinned by specific brain network dysfunction. The neuroanatomic associations of the amusias show substantial overlap with brain networks that process speech; however, this convergence leaves scope for separable brain mechanisms based on altered connectivity and dynamics across culprit networks. The study of the amusias contributes to an increasingly complex picture of the musical brain that transcends any simple dichotomy between music and speech or other complex sounds.
Brief pitch-priming facilitates infants' discrimination of pitch-evoking noise: Evidence from event-related potentials
2013, Brain and Cognition
Pitch is derived by the auditory system through complex spectrotemporal processing. Pitch extraction is thought to depend on both spectral cues arising from lower harmonics that are resolved by cochlear filters in the inner ear, and on temporal cues arising from the pattern of action potentials contained in the cochlear output. Adults are capable of extracting pitch in the absence of robust spectral cues, taking advantage of the temporal cues that remain. However, recent behavioral evidence suggests that infants have difficulty discriminating between stimuli with different pitches when resolvable spectral cues are absent. In the current experiments, we used the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event related potential derived from electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings to examine a cortical representation of pitch discrimination for iterated rippled noise (IRN) stimuli in 4- and 8-month-old infants. IRN stimuli are pitch-evoking sounds generated by repeatedly adding a segment of white noise to itself at a constant delay. We created IRN stimuli (delays of 5 and 6 ms creating pitch percepts of 200 and 167 Hz) and high-pass filtered them to remove all resolvable spectral pitch cues. In experiment 1, we did not find EEG evidence that infants could detect the change in the pitch of these IRN stimuli. However, in Experiment 2, after a brief period of pitch-priming during which we added a sine wave component to the IRN stimulus at its perceived pitch, infants did show significant MMN in response to pitch changes in the IRN stimuli with sine waves removed. This suggests that (1) infants can use temporal cues to process pitch, although such processing is not mature and (2) that a short amount of pitch-priming experience can alter pitch representations in auditory cortex during infancy.
Changes in singing performance and fMRI activation following right temporal lobe surgery
2013, Cortex
Citation Excerpt :
Before surgery, A.M.'s partial activation of the nonexpert singing network and in particular, minimal activation of the right superior temporal gyrus augured well for her post-operative outcome. Nonetheless, she was counselled conservatively given the known risks of RATL to fine pitch discrimination and pitch working memory (Dennis and Hopyan, 2001; Liégeois-Chauvel et al., 1998; Samson, 1999; Samson and Zatorre, 1988, 1991, 1992; Wilson et al., 1999; Wilson and Saling, 2008; Zatorre, 1985), which were preserved in A.M. before surgery and play a core role in singing. She then underwent a more tailored anterior temporal lobectomy that preserved the right superior temporal gyrus.
This study arose in the context of having to estimate risk to the musical abilities of a trained singer (patient A.M.) recommended for right anterior temporal lobectomy (RATL) to ameliorate medically intractable seizures. To date there has been no systematic investigation of reorganisation of musical functions in the presence of epileptogenic lesions, although it is well established that RATL can impair pitch processing in nonmusicians.
Using fMRI, we compared the network activated by covert singing with lyrics in A.M. before and after surgery, while taking language activation and singing expertise into consideration. Before surgery, A.M. showed lower pitch accuracy of singing relative to individuals of similar experience (experts), thus we compared her to 12 healthy controls matched for singing pitch accuracy.
We found atypical organisation of A.M.'s singing network before surgery in the presence of a malformation of cortical development, including partial activation of the singing network of pitch-matched controls, and diffuse activation along the midline spreading laterally into association cortex, typical of generalised cortical hyperexcitability in intractable epilepsy. After tailored RATL, A.M. showed striking behavioural and neuroimaging changes, including significant improvement in pitch accuracy of singing relative to controls (p = .026) and the subjective experience of being a more technically proficient singer. This was accompanied by a significant reduction in cortical activation (p < .05, corrected), with a more focal, expert-like pattern of singing activation emerging, including decreased involvement of frontal language regions. These changes were largely specific to singing, with A.M. showing language activation and performance similar to controls.
This case provides evidence for selective disruption of the singing network that reorganised after successful resection of an epileptogenic lesion and likely occurred through decoupling of the singing and language networks.

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Discrimination and recognition of tonal melodies after unilateral cerebral excisions

Abstract

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Pitch as a medium: a new approach to psychophysical scaling

Am. J. Psychol.

The amusias

Auditory findings in patients with temporal lobectomies

Am. Sp. Hear. Assoc.

Octave generalization and the consolidation of melodic information

Can. J. Psychol.

Scale and contour: two components of a theory of memory for melodies

Psychol. Rev.

Melodic information processing and its development