Anthropomorphism, Intussusception and Amusia

I love words, and one of my all time favourite things is to stumble across a new one.  "Anthropomorphism" was a hit when I was about 8.  "Intussusception" is still an epic inspiration.  And Ms. Alison's word for today?  "Amusia".

"Amusia" refers to the inability to not just produce a specific pitch, but to be able to distinguish pitch at all.  To an amusiac,  music itself is unpleasant noise.  Which I find hilarious because to my ears a great deal of what is currently passed off as "music" is excruciatingly unpleasant noise with way too much woof in the subwoofer and much too much auto in the autotuning.  No exaggeration, it physically hurts.

Anyway, a new parent informed me today that her belief is, as no less an authority than Simon Cowell of American Idol has informed us, "either you can sing, or you can't (and if you can't you suck)".  Upon reflection I suppose I was expected to enthuse that yes, her four year old is profoundly gifted because he can approximate the general area surrounding a pitch, and therefore does not suck.  However it didn't even occur to me, as I have never met anyone who could not be hoodwinked into singing basically in tune within a comfortable vocal range.  Like maybe "Happy Birthday" without the high note.

She got a bit belligerent though, and even I started to question my audacious conclusions, based as they are upon a graduate degree in vocal pedagogy and thousands of hours of actual experience with actual people with actual voices.  So I googled the question, as one does, and, hooray!  discovered today's awesome new word.  I learned that it is true that about 4% of the population are really and truly congenitally amusical:  it is classified as a form of learning disorder, unrelated to intelligence, but with some relation to certain modes of memory and other higher functions. Structurally there are close parallels to the divergences found in the brains of those with dyslexia and epilepsy.  Acquired amusia is a fairly common short term effect of strokes in specific brain areas, and, in some cases, lesions lead to permanent incapacities.

I really hope I get to run into someone amusical one day.  It would be very interesting to learn about their world.  Apart from anything else we could conduct cool experiments measuring our relative pain thresholds listening to Justin Bieber. 

I can't wait for the next time someone claims they would just love to sing but can't because they are totally tone deaf, etc.  The probability of this being literally true is exactly zero percent.  If they were one of the 4% of true amusiacs, music itself would be such an unpleasant experience they would have no desire to sing anyway.  If they lacked the vocal co-ordination to sing, they wouldn't have enough voice to be complaining about their presumed lack of ability.

Life is too short to convince yourself you have nothing to sing worth hearing, after all.