Talk:Tone deafness

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POV issues, or at least my POVs:

• Musical ability is a species-specific characteristic or at least a species wide activity.
• Thus people with normal hearing (the ability to discriminate pitch) and no musical training and are unable to sing in tune are not tone deaf.
• Tone deafness is not the opposite of absolute pitch, but seemingly the lack of relative pitch (or, rather, part of the pitch discrimination skill that is lacking)
• I'm not sure if there is such a thing as a "musical disability". If that is not a common term or concept then it should not be used.

Hyacinth 21:30, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm not so much worried about the POV of this article - though the tone (no pun intended) does seem a bit condescending at times - I'm disputing the truth of what the article says. Several things seem to be totally mis-labeled and mis-defined.

Tone deaf is analogous to deaf deaf, and refers to what a person can hear or discern, not what he can vocalize. What this article discusses might be properly labeled "tone dumb," because it's analogous to people who are dumb (not meaning stupid, but in the original sense of inability to speak.) Someone with (passive) absolute pitch could still theoretically be "tone dumb" and unable to carry a tune. And of course tones can sound quite different to the speaker/singer (coming from within their body) than they do to others.

A tone deaf person is one who can't tell if someone else is singing out of tune, or who couldn't tell that he was singing out of tune if his voice was played back to him.

So yeah - I'd say this article should either be totally re-written or deleted. Maybe the vocal parts of it could be relabeled and moved to a "tone dumb" article?...

As for the inability to play musical instruments - well that's just something that people don't know - I guess you could call that "musically illiterate" (analagous to "computer illiterate.")

--Blackcats 07:20, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

PS - Here's some links to how several dictionaries define it:

[1] [2] [3]

Maybe the article could mention how some people confuse it with "tone dumbness."

--Blackcats 07:32, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. Couldn't think last night, but this morning I realized what I was trying to remember was from John Blacking's How Musical Is Man? [sic]. In my opinion the main POV issue is that the article treats music only as performance, while musical ability most definitely includes audition, discrimination, and labelling and performing. Hyacinth 08:15, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Revisions

I've made some major revisions with your above comments in mind and removed the NPOV/Factual inaccuracy boilerplates. Check out the new version and comment here (I'll watch this page for a while) or on my talk page. Feel free to replace the boilerplates if you find it appropriate. Matthewcieplak 03:16, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Amusia

Amusia links here, but I've never heard "tone deaf" used to refer to amusia and I think it is a probably a fairly rare usage. However, this article seems to be mostly about amusia, or at least a limited form of amusia (what the article calls the medical definition of tone deaf). I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but it seems that there are at least two distinguishable manifestations or levels of severity of amusia: 1) difficulty or inability to distinguish the different pitches of notes, resulting in a difficulty or inability to reproduce music, 2) the complete inability to hear music as music, possibly because of an inability to distinguish different pitches. Again, I don't know much about this, but there may be other reasons a person is unable to hear music (such as damage to the part of the brain that finds the patterns in sound that most people recognize as musical). I think amusia should have it's own article, and this article should be more about the common usage, with a note that difficulty reproducing music may be due to either a lack of training or a limited form of amusia. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 20:49, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There appears to be confusion between the terms "tone deaf" and "Amusia". This article is a good summary of "Tone Deaf", but Amusia deserves it's own page, as it is the acquired loss of musical abilities through brain lesions. The distinction between "tone deaf" and "amusia" is the same as that between "illiteracy" and "aphasia". Research into aphasia is very developed; German musicologists and neurologists have shown a deep interest in amusia but there are few writings in English (Henson's chapter in Clinical Neurology vol 45, 1985 is still the standard text). Amusia does have it's own page on the German Wikipedia but it's a stub. I am happy to write a seperate article on "Amusia" when I have time over the next month or so, please offer any suggestions. BigNorwich 16th October 2006

[edit] Tests for true tone deafness?

There are the very popular color blot tests for color blindness, are there audio samples used to diagnose true tone deafness as well? Maybe playing different tones of the same timbre & frequency simultaneously and alone and seeing whether one can decipher between them played in different orders? Nagelfar 06:44, 12 February 2006 (UTC)