Transient Ischemic Attacks Presenting with a Loss of Pitch Perception

It has been suggested that the non-dominant hemisphere is specialized for receptive and expressive music and prosody. The present report describes a patient who experienced a series of non-dominant hemisphere transient ischemic attacks (TIA's) which included an inability to perceive intonation during one episode, and a failure to perceive melody during another. The perceptual losses during these TIA's are consistent with experimental results which suggest that the non-dominant hemisphere is specialized for complex-pitch processing. In some instances, amusia, dysprosody, and aprosodia reflect a common functional deficit.