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Cortical deafness to dissonance Peretz I, Blood AJ, Penhune V, Zatorre R Brain 2001 May, 124: 928-940 Comment: This well-documented case study reports that a person with partial amusia, due to bilateral cerebral damage, perceives the major-minor difference in the same way as normal control subjects do, while being unable to perform simple tasks of dissonance detection. The report presents the first experimental evidence that consonance perception and major-minor perception are independent from each other. These findings disprove some popular and longstanding theoretical assumptions, but they agree with results on pitch processing from the past two decades. (Comment Martin Braun) A testable account of a plausible mechanism underlying the major-minor perception is outlined here. From p. 938-939 of the article: "The major-minor mode differentiation is often viewed as a by-product of the consonance principle. By most accounts, the major mode is associated with happiness, or with a positive valence, because it is more consonant or 'natural'. Such an acoustic account goes back to Rameau and von Helmholtz (for a review, see Crowder, 1984). For example, von Helmholtz (1954, pp. 214-17) asserted that the negative connotation for minor harmonies is only a special case of the 'inherent distress' that listeners experience for dissonance. However, I.R.'s results suggest that consonance and major mode (or dissonance and minor mode) are separable phenomena of pitch perception." |