The reading disability Dyslexia is relatively well-known, wherein someone confuses certain letters for others. For example, a “b” may read as “d” or “p” may read as some other letter, possibly “q.” However, I never imagined dyslexia could possibly affect someone’s ability to read music.
Dysmusia, also called musical Dyslexia, is the difficulty in reading musical symbols and notations. Reading music involves many parts of the brain, including motor, visual, auditory, audiovisual, somatosensory, parietal, and frontal areas in both hemispheres and the cerebellum. When one or more of these brain parts are compromised, one may have Dysmusia. (Source: https://neurosciencenews.com/musical-dyslexia-17971/)
Dysmusia immediately caught my attention while browsing articles about music and the brain. After reading a little about it, I was surprised to see that such a phenomenon can exist. I am a musician myself, and play both the piano and viola. I never knew one could struggle to read and understand musical symbols, as I always assumed people who are less good note readers just need more time and practice, not that they actually had a disability that may prevent them from reading notes quickly and fluently.
Dysmusia isn’t yet an officially diagnosis, however the scientific community believes it’s real, largely because of its similar functionality to Dyslexia. As reading music requires many parts of the brain to be used, an issue in any one of them can result in Dysmusia. This is quite similar to Dyslexia, the difficulty in reading letters, and Dyscalculia, the difficulty in reading numbers and mathematical symbols. These two disabilities are caused by a compromised part of the brain. Dyslexia is the result of a compromised temporal or occipital lobe, and Dyscalculia is caused by a “deficit in spatial processing in the parietal lobe.” If compromised areas of the brain can result in a difficulty in reading letters or, numbers, then why not reading music?
After reading many articles about Dysmusia, I’ve given a lot of thought about how we might understand the disability, and possibly even a way to treat it.
People with Dyslexia often undergo therapy to help them identify letters, relate those characters to sounds, and then combine all those sounds to read a word. This is precisely how we begin to read as young children. I recall the “Fundations” unit in my kindergarten classroom, when we learned which letters make which sounds. Then, when we had to read a word, we broke up the word into individual sounds and tapped out those sounds, before combining all of them to say the complete word. People with Dyslexia go through therapy to relearn how to identify the letters and combine them into a word; essentially just relearning this whole process.
As music is really just another language, it makes sense for Dysmusia also to be treated in the same way. People with Dysmusia can also get over the disability with therapy to identify symbols (notes) and relate them with the correct pitch on the instrument they are playing. With time and effort, people are generally able to overcome Dyslexia, and I think people with Dysmusia can also overcome it in a similar way.
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