If you’ve ever watched guests at a wedding dance, this might surprise you, but evidently the inability to recognize (and follow) a musical beat is very rare. In fact, researchers have only just documented the first official case of “beat deafness,” according to Science News.
A test subject named Mathieu was unable to tap his feet or move in time to a beat-heavy, Latin dance tune called Sauvemente. He could imitate someone next to him, tapping his foot, but when the person stopped he was once again left “flail[ing] in a time zone of his own.” (He was one of several people to respond to a general call for test subjects who thought they couldn’t keep track of musical time, but only he qualified.)
Mathieu, whose brain appears to be healthy, also had significant trouble in identifying when another person was dancing in time, or not.
He can carry a tune, so it is only one aspect of music, albeit a fundamental one, that he is deaf to. The researchers who discovered Mathieu plan to investigate whether there are other aspects of rhythm that befuddle him, such as how to take turns during a conversation or how to match someone’s stride.
Science News has video that gets across how Mathieu looks when he dances, but, mercifully, he is represented by an abstract dot.
“Born to Dance but Beat Deaf: A New Form of Congenital Amusia” is forthcoming in Neuropsychologia.
P.S. 3/8. I’m reading the original paper now, and there are some great lines. (“All control participants showed signiﬁcant phase-locking to the musical
beat of each music, except for one control who failed to synchronize to the piece Too darn hot.” Been there.)