Listening to Florence try to sing opera could make your stomach hurt. She struggled with pitch the same way some people struggle with weight. “No one, before or since, has succeeded in liberating themselves quite so completely from the shackles of musical notation,” noted one critic.
The Florence I’m describing is Florence Foster Jenkins, a person whose real story was the subject of the movie “Florence Foster Jenkins”. Masterfully depicted by Meryl Streep (who in real life has a beautiful voice), the film chronicles a wealthy but tone-deaf socialite who dreams of becoming an opera star. Because she had money, she had the means to make her “gifts” public.
Neural nerd that I am, seeing the movie made me immediately think of Monica, the case study I described last entry. She too had pitch problems, suffering from a condition known as congenital amusia.
Though Florence was never investigated formally by the scientific community, there are people with Florence’s problem who have. One thoroughly examined case was the vocal talents of a 62-year-old Japanese patient I’ll call Yuki. Due to a stroke, she lost the ability to “sing well” - meaning she could no longer carry a tune. The deficit was broad-based, encompassing anything that had to do with frequency perception, including pitch interval production.
This must have been horrific. Yuki loved karaoke, which in her pre-stroke life she did competently, and even had the tapes to prove it. As the researchers investigated, they discovered that virtually every other aspect of her musical ability was preserved. Her sense of rhythm, for example, remained intact.
NEURAL SUBSTRATES
This is just one example of something researchers have known for years about the musical module, the set of brain circuits that appear a to be dedicated to music. Researching the brains of people like Yuki reveals its complex structure. We now know that pitch and rhythm are subserved by different neurological substrates, for example. You can suffer damage to the module’s melodic circuitry, but leave the circuits that process the beat intact.
Yuki in a nutshell.
Thanks to people like her, we even know something about where these pitch-specific circuits reside. In most people, they hang out in the right hemisphere of the brain. (As you may recall from an old bio class, the brain can be divided into two large regions called hemispheres, looking something like a walnut). The pitch stuff is located in the right hemisphere.
But not just any region of the right hemisphere. The pitch-governing tissues are resident inside a complex series of neurons called the frontotemporal network. This sprawling spiderweb of neural circuits exist throughout the brain, many located around the ear. They are often associated with less musical like activities like the ability to read this sentence - or any written text. The circuits also moonlight in music-land, allow you to sing competently in a karaoke.
Or not. Something about which, sadly, Yuki could tell you a great deal.
REFERENCES
Pile, Stephen (1979). The Book of Heroic Failures: Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. Futura, p. 115
Murayama, J. et al. "Impaired Pitch Production and Preserved Rhythm Production in a Right Brain-Damaged Patient with Amusia." Brain Cogn 56, no. 1 (2004): 36-42.
Woolnough, O. et al. "Spatiotemporally Distributed Frontotemporal Networks for Sentence Reading." PNAS 120 (2023).