[Amusia and its topic specification].

A historical development of views on amusia and its clinical phenomenology is reviewed. The authors present a case of atypical amusia in a patient aged 32 years with glioma of the right temporal lobe including the upper temporal gyrus. Amusia was combined with euphoria and disturbances of evaluation of speech intonation. It has been assumed that different mechanisms implicated with different regions of both brain hemispheres may underlie amusia. Sometimes these mechanisms appear to be universal, e.g. disorders of symbolic gnosis in posterior hemisphere lesions, being comorbid with amusia as disturbances in reading music and letter agnosia. In our case, the right temporal lobe lesion, especially with involvement of the upper temporal gyrus, caused specific music agnosia with disturbances of perception of some notes and duration of their phonation or a musical contour of the whole melody. Motor amusia is developed due to additional disturbances of motor and premotor brain functions, with significant contribution of the Broca's speech area. Music may be a model for investigation into processes of multimodal integration and hemisphere interaction.