Amusie is not the country where we have fun but a malfunction of our brain which results in a loss of musical skills, an inability to recognize and reproduce musical sounds.
Amusia is manifested by disturbances in listening. For example, Che Guevara was apparently unable to tell the difference between a salsa or a military march. They say that music is the language of emotions. There are areas and circuits in our brain that allow us to perceive the emotional aspects of music such as its joy or its sadness. This function is different from that which allows the musician to read and perform.
The difference between virtuoso and genius
This explains the difference between the virtuoso and the genius. The interpretation capacities of the two are undoubtedly equivalent but their aptitude to capture the emotion of the music, and therefore to retranslate it, explains this enormous little nothing which shapes the legend of Rubinstein, Gould or Karajan. Rather, medicine is interested in patients like this woman who, after suffering from 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 tracks was Albinoni’s Adagio. After his accident, she couldn’t identify him anymore, but liked him because she said 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 very unconsciously calls on knowledge.
Ravel unable to transcribe
What the history of music already told us. For example, Maurice Ravel, the famous composer of the Boléro, at the end of his life could no longer transcribe the music he heard in his head, although 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 strengthen social cohesion, which would have made the musical brain an adaptive advantage retained by natural selection.
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