Ongoing History Daily: Maybe your friend really can’t sing
Do you have a friend or have you ever known someone who just doesn’t “get” music? And by that I mean a person who has an overall bad sense of music: someone who can sing or dance or even tap their foot along to the song. They just may have a medical condition.
Researchers think there’s such a thing as the musical equivalent to dyslexia that they called “dysmusia.” With dyslexia, people have a hard time comprehending the written word. With “dysmusia,” they have a hard time comprehending the music that they hear. For example, when they listen to a well-known song–someone as popular as, say, “Happy Birthday to You,” they couldn’t identify it. However, when given the printed lyrics, they got it right away.
No one knows how many people have dysmusia simply because anyone who has it is often just shrugged off as being musically untalented. And who takes their kid to a doctor just because he or she can’t sing?
