Tone deafness is the lack of relative pitch, or the inability to distinguish between musical notes that is not due to the lack of musical training or education. Tone deafness is also known variously as amusia, tune deafness, "tin ear", dysmelodia and dysmusia.

The ability to hear and reproduce relative pitch, as with other musical abilities, is inherent in healthy functional humans.^{[dubious – discuss]} The hearing impairment appears to be genetically influenced, though it can also result from brain damage. Someone who is unable to reproduce pitches because of a lack of musical training would not be considered tone deaf in a medical sense. Tone deafness affects the ability to hear relative pitch changes produced by a musical instrument.

However, tone deaf people seem to be^{[not in citation given]} disabled only when it comes to music, as they can fully interpret the prosody or intonation of human speech. Tone deafness has a strong negative correlation with belonging to societies with tonal languages. This could be evidence that the ability to reproduce and distinguish between notes may be a learned skill, but may conversely suggest that the genetic predisposition towards accurate pitch discrimination may influence the linguistic development of a population towards tonality. A correlation between allele frequencies and linguistic typological features has been recently discovered, supporting the latter hypothesis.