ArticleEuropean journal of human genetics : EJHG2017
Prevalence of congenital amusia.
Article in European journal of human genetics : EJHG, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 133 citations in OpenAlex.
- Musical rhythm abilities and risk for developmental speech-language problems and disorders: epidemiological and polygenic associations.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Atypical Change Detection in Sound Sequences: A Behavioral and Magnetoencephalography Study in Congenital Amusia.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Beyond the notes: Clarifying the role of expressivity in conveying musical emotion.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Spontaneous production rates in music and speech: Effector systems or domain specificity?Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Altered music emotion experiences of congenital amusia: from the perspective of reward.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Effects of vocal-motor interference on vocal pitch imitation.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Sounds of Hidden Agents: The Development of Causal Reasoning About Musical Sounds.Developmental science · 2025Article
- The shared genetic architecture and evolution of human language and musical rhythm.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Exploring the role of singing, semantics, and amusia screening in speech-in-noise perception in musicians and non-musicians.Cognitive processing · 2024Article
- Evidence for a shared cognitive mechanism underlying relative rhythmic and melodic perception.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Associations between major depressive disorder and performance-based and self-reported music cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Listening habits and subjective effects of background music in young adults with and without ADHD.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Biological principles for music and mental health.Translational psychiatry · 2023Review
- Vocal similarity theory and the biology of musical tonality.Physics of life reviews · 2023Article
- Web-based psychoacoustics of binaural hearing: Two validation experiments.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023Article
- Consonance Perception in Congenital Amusia: Behavioral and Brain Responses to Harmonicity and Beating Cues.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- FORUM: Remote testing for psychological and physiological acoustics.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2022Article
- Congenital amusia-pathology of musical disorder.Journal of applied genetics · 2022Review
- Pitch Discrimination Testing in Patients with a Voice Disorder.Journal of clinical medicine · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Congenital amusia (commonly known as tone deafness) is a lifelong musical disorder that affects 4% of the population according to a single estimate based on a single test from 1980. Here we present the first large-based measure of prevalence with a sample of 20 000 participants, which does not rely on self-referral. On the basis of three objective tests and a questionnaire, we show that (a) the prevalence of congenital amusia is only 1.5%, with slightly more females than males, unlike other developmental disorders where males often predominate; (b) self-disclosure is a reliable index of congenital amusia, which suggests that congenital amusia is hereditary, with 46% first-degree relatives similarly affected; (c) the deficit is not attenuated by musical training and (d) it emerges in relative isolation from other cognitive disorder, except for spatial orientation problems. Hence, we suggest that congenital amusia is likely to result from genetic variations that affect musical abilities specifically.
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