amusement

Amusia is manifested by disturbances in listening. For example, Che Guevara was apparently unable to tell the difference between a salsa and a military march. It is said that music is the language of emotions. There are areas and circuits in our brain that allow us to perceive emotional aspects of music such as its joy or sadness. This function is different from that which allows the musician to read and perform. This explains the difference between virtuoso and genius. The interpretative capacities of the two are undoubtedly equivalent, but their ability to capture the emotion of the music, and therefore to translate it, explains this enormous little nothing that shapes the legend of Rubinstein, Gould or Karajan. Medicine is more interested in patients like this woman who, after suffering a ruptured cerebral aneurysm – a vessel in her brain that had exploded – was unable to recognize music but loved to listen to it. One of his favorite pieces was Albinoni’s Adagio. After his accident, she could no longer identify him, but liked him because according to her, he was sad and slow. In his brain, the areas of emotion were intact, that of recognition, affected by a lack of blood circulation. According to the researchers, this emotional perception is independent of knowledge. This is confirmed by work on similar sensations such as the perception of danger, which only calls for knowledge in a very unconscious way.

What the history of music already told us. For example, Maurice Ravel, the famous composer of Boléro, could no longer transcribe the music he heard in his head at the end of his life, even though he had retained the ability to play other pieces perfectly. It seems that musical skill is innate, some even think that our first form of language was sung. It is more likely to enhance social cohesion, which would have made the musical brain an adaptive advantage retained by natural selection.

Doctor Jean-Francois Lemoine

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