Aim:
To provide an overview of MR’s general cognitive and musical abilities to gain an understanding of issues that required further exploration.

Procedure:
1. MR was compared to five controls on a range of musical tasks.
2. The controls were matched for age, sex, handedness, and musical background.
3. The results were then recorded

Findings:
Overall, his pattern of results showed that he was impaired on basic pitch tasks, implying a low level perceptual disturbance. Within the melodic domain he showed impairment for interval and tonal processing but unimpaired contour processing, although investigation of contour processing was limited. Within the temporal organisation domain, he showed impaired rhythmic processing despite preserved metre.
MR failed to recognise music and environmental sounds although these results were somewhat confounded by his involuntary experience of musical illusions while performing these tasks. He also showed impaired ability to access identifying information about musical works, such as 'The Magic Flute' by Mozart, that were once highly familiar to him. MR showed selectively spared identification of musical instruments, however, this inference was inconclusive due to a background variable - 'time spent listening to music' - on which the control group was significantly lower when compared with MR.

Conclusion:
While MR showed impaired performance on basic melodic discrimination tasks, these tasks assess the ability to form auditory representations and are based on the assumption that perceptual processing has already occurred. Therefore, a thorough perceptual analysis of MR's pitch perception and auditory scene analysis was required. The pattern of MR's deficits provided a rare opportunity to examine low-level perceptual problems that may underpin associative agnosia, not just in one domain, but across various domains.

Critiques:
This thesis addresses a number of issues that remained unresolved by Beckwith (2003). MR's initial description of music as broad spectrum noise, together with his musical illusions pointed to a largely unexplored perceptual auditory deficit.