What is tone deafness?
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It usually means poor pitch discrimination. If two notes are close together, you have difficulty telling if one pitch is higher than the other and their relative distance apart. It can also mean someone who doesn’t recognize when their own singing is offkey, regardless of what they might recognize in others.
Tone deafness It is usually just a matter of degree, some people are just better than you are, but a small percentage of people have a condition called amusia. This goes beyond not recognizing pitch, their brains don’t get the whole concept of music, they don’t recognize entire tunes and can’t tell when a note is incorrect.
Tone deafness can also be used as a metaphor for not reading emotions or understanding a social situation to the point where you say or do something inappropriate. Complaining about how unfair it was to work an extra hour to someone who just pulled a double shift is tone deaf.
There are two principal meanings behind being “tone deaf.”
1. You can’t hear musical pitch in your head while you are singing and therefore can’t match the pitch of the music you are singing to or relative to yourself. In simple terms, you are always sharp or flat and never sound good.
2. A modern usage meaning you are saying something without considering the optics of what you are saying. Meaning, you can say something that may or may not be true, but saying at that particular time or in the particular way will be upsetting and you had no idea that it could possibly be upsetting. Talking about your wonderful mother’s day plans to someone at their mother’s funeral, for a crazy example from my own life.
Tone deafness (technically called “amusia”) has varying degrees, but in its extreme form is a complete inability to recognise the tonal variation in a simple melody. That’s quite rare, and most people who are said to be tone deaf don’t have this extreme form. At the other extreme of ability, we have this: https://youtu.be/vXivZlPu0ms
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