Grant: Operating Grant

The last decade of research has provided compelling evidence that the ability to engage with music is a fundamental human trait. As language skills, musical abilities are universal, complex and rapidly acquired by children without explicit tutoring. Yet the biological basis of the human ability to listen, to sing and dance remains largely mysterious. Recently, we pointed out that a small number of individuals fail to acquire these abilities and that these deficiencies might be hereditary. Such a musical disorder is now termed "congenital amusia", an umbrella term for lifelong musical disabilities that cannot be attributed to mental retardation, autism, deafness or lack of exposure. Congenital disorders can offer special insight into the behavioral, neural and genetic basis of music cognition because these disorders provide a natural experiment, a rare chance to examine how variance within the human genome influences the brain and cognition. Seeking relevant information for each of these aspects motivates the empirical enterprise described in the present proposal.