What's Amusia Got to Do With It

A few years ago I learned that I have something called congenital amusia, an inherited condition that can make it impossible to carry a tune or learn to play a musical instrument. In other words, amusia is tone deafness, or to use a derogatory expression, tin ears.

Amusia is defined as: "a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition" (Wikipedia). Some studies suggest that as many as 4% of people are born with an innate inability to recognize musical tones or to reproduce them. This is referred to as congenital amusia.

In 2018, advances in genetics led me to discover that my lifelong failure to sing or learn guitar —despite great effort—was due to congenital amusia, not some weird character defect (although you can still find music coaches who insist that amusiacs are just being lazy).

When time permits, I plan to blog about my own journey with amusia, but in the meantime I put up a separate website —4Amusia.com— to curate links to information about amusia. Those links should not be taken as endorsements of the content to which I link, and the look and feel of the site may change over time; however, I am also color blind (deutan), so please excuse any jarring color choices you may encounter there.

You might be surprised at how many things can be affected by amusia, like some forms of speech and comprehension. The leading researcher in all things amusic is Dr. Isabelle Peretz and if you're interested in this topic her website is the place to look. It features a link to an online hearing test that you can take to diagnose amusia.

For myself, the stigma of being a tone deaf child was unpleasant, and the decades spent failing to learn a musical instrument were frustrating. At times I experienced deep sadness at not being able to express my feelings in song in the presence of other humans. Nevertheless, learning that there is a physical basis for these limitations, rather than some character defect, was quite liberating!