IELTS Reading 69: The Brain That Misses the Tune

Adapted from Peretz Lab / PMC Neuroscience Reviews (2025-2026). IELTS Reading Section 3 difficulty, approximately 1,050 words. Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12399327/

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Reading Passage

A. Most people, when they hear a familiar melody, do not have to think about whether two consecutive notes rise or fall in pitch; they simply know, effortlessly and unconsciously. A small minority cannot. For them, a tune on the radio is not a sequence of musical intervals but an undifferentiated wash of sound, and a well-loved song is as hard to recognise as a ringtone they have heard a hundred times. The condition is popularly called "tone deafness", but scientists prefer the term congenital amusia, and it is far more specific than its nickname suggests. Roughly four percent of the population is thought to experience it, and it is not, as the name might imply, a problem with the ears. People with amusia have normal hearing, normal intelligence, normal exposure to music and normal speech; their difficulty is confined almost entirely to the melodic pitch dimension. They can hear that two notes sound different, but they cannot reliably tell which is higher, or remember the contour of a melody long enough to sing it back. A popular tune that most people hum without effort passes through their ears as a succession of unrelated tones, and they may sit through an entire concert without feeling what the rest of the audience is feeling.

B. The condition has been recognised only recently as a genuine disorder. For most of the twentieth century, an inability to carry a tune was dismissed as a lack of talent or musical training — something that would improve with lessons. Then, in a series of studies from the early 2000s, the neuropsychologist Isabelle Peretz and her colleagues showed that tone deafness is lifelong, stable and cannot be explained by bad teaching. People with amusia performed normally on almost every test of hearing and memory, yet failed, again and again, on tasks that asked them to compare two musical pitches separated by even a short delay. This dissociation — normal hearing, normal memory, but a specific musical blindness — is what made the condition interesting to neurologists rather than merely to music teachers. The deficit is not absolute: given enough time, many amusics can distinguish a very large interval, such as an octave, but small steps — the intervals that make up most melodies — remain slippery. Crucially, the condition runs in families, which points to a genetic contribution rather than a purely cultural one. A tone-deaf parent often has a tone-deaf child, even when the child is surrounded by music at home.

C. Imaging studies have begun to show where in the brain this difficulty lives. The normal appreciation of melody is thought to depend on a loop between the auditory cortex, which receives the incoming sound, and the inferior frontal cortex, which holds and compares it — a circuit that lets you notice that the second note was flat. In amusic brains, this loop appears to be weakened. Researchers have measured reduced connectivity between the left and right auditory cortices, so that musical signals are processed separately in each hemisphere rather than being jointly analysed, creating two streams that never converge into a single judgement. Other studies have found abnormal grey and white matter in the very regions that handle pitch. The picture is not of a broken ear but of a communication failure: the sound arrives, but the brain never closes the loop needed to monitor it consciously. This is why many amusics are unaware that anything is wrong; the signal reaches them, but the system that would flag "that note was off" does not fire. They may hear a melody every day for years without ever realising that other people hear its rises and falls as a coherent shape.

D. The condition also turns out to touch more than music. Because pitch carries emotional and linguistic information, some researchers have asked whether amusia reaches into speech itself. There is evidence that amusics are slightly poorer at judging the tone of voice — detecting whether a speaker sounds sarcastic, surprised or question-like purely from the rise and fall of pitch — and they can struggle with tone languages, in which the same syllable means different things depending on its pitch. A 2026 study found that amusic participants performed worse on tasks repeating non-words that carried lexical tones, and showed reduced activation in a brain region that handles both speech melody and musical pitch. The link is subtle, however: most amusics speak perfectly well in everyday life, and the deficit remains, for the most part, confined to the musical world they can no longer enter. This partial overlap between speech melody and musical pitch is what makes the condition so revealing — it shows that the brain reuses the same machinery for tasks that feel entirely separate.

E. What can be done? The hope of a cure has met a sobering reality. Intensive pitch-matching exercises, tailored to individuals, can produce small measurable improvements, and distributional learning — simply being exposed to repeated pitch patterns — seems to help some amusics adapt. But the condition appears to be a stable feature of how these brains are wired, not a deficit that training simply repairs. The deeper value of studying amusia may lie less in treating it than in what it reveals about the rest of us. By looking at the small four percent for whom melody never resolves, researchers infer the quiet machinery — the loop, the comparison, the conscious monitoring — that allows the other ninety-six percent to hear a tune and feel it move them. Tone deafness, in this sense, is not merely a disability; it is a window onto the ordinary miracle that most people never know they are performing. To hear a melody as anything more than noise is to run, effortlessly and without thanks, a circuit that four percent of us simply cannot close — a reminder that the gifts we take for granted are the ones our brains hide best.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. What amusia is — and what it is not ii. Recognising it as a lifelong, stable disorder iii. Where the deficit lives in the brain iv. Whether amusia spills over into speech v. What can — and cannot — be done vi. How to cure deafness vii. The history of popular songs

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What distinguishes congenital amusia from ordinary "tone deafness"? A. It is caused by damaged ears. B. It is a lifelong, stable deficit confined to musical pitch, with normal hearing. C. It affects speech production in everyone. D. It is cured by musical lessons.

6. According to the imaging studies, where does the problem lie? A. In the outer ear only. B. In a weakened loop between auditory cortex and inferior frontal cortex. C. In the optic nerve. D. In the muscle control of the larynx.

7. Why are many amusics unaware of their condition? A. They cannot hear any sound at all. B. The brain circuit that would flag "that note was off" does not fire. C. They refuse to admit it. D. Doctors never tell them.

8. How does amusia relate to speech? A. It always causes severe speech problems. B. It can subtly affect judging tone of voice and tone languages. C. It improves pronunciation. D. It is unrelated to pitch entirely.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Roughly four percent of the population is thought to experience congenital amusia.
10. Musical training has been shown to fully cure congenital amusia.
11. Amusics show reduced connectivity between the left and right auditory cortices.
12. Amusics always have severe problems speaking in daily life.
13. Famous musicians have been diagnosed with congenital amusia.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Amusia is not an ear problem but a failure of a neural (14) ________ between the auditory cortex and the frontal cortex; although targeted exercises may bring small gains, the condition appears to be a stable feature of how the brain is (15) ________.

Answers & Explanations

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