TO HEAR A RECORDING OF THIS PUBLIC LECTURE 

The lecture will consider what is known about the brain mechanisms for processing music including the analysis of pitch, melody, timbre, rhythm and emotion. Professor Griffiths is a neurologist who studies the brain activity in normal subjects when they listen to music and patients with abnormal musical perception due to brain disorder. Recent work suggests that the disorder known as tone deafness can be understood as a lifelong deficit in the analysis of pitch patterns, due to an abnormality of the cortex in the brain that can sometimes be caused by a single gene.  Professor Griffiths is Professor of Cognitive Neurology at Newcastle University and Wellcome Senior Clinical Fellow. His research centres on neuroscience and the investigation of complex sound processing by the brain (‘the mind’s ear’) and what happens to the processing of sound in patients with brain disorders.