Music training enhances the rapid plasticity of P3a/P3b event-related brain potentials for unattended and attended target sounds

Neurocognitive studies have shown that extensive musical training enhances P3a and P3b event-related potentials for infrequent target sounds, which reflects stronger attention switching and stimulus evaluation in musicians than in nonmusicians. However, it is unknown whether the short-term plasticity of P3a and P3b responses is also enhanced in musicians. We compared the short-term plasticity of P3a and P3b responses to infrequent target sounds in musicians and nonmusicians during auditory perceptual learning tasks. Target sounds, deviating in location, pitch, and duration with three difficulty levels, were interspersed among frequently presented standard sounds in an oddball paradigm. We found that during passive exposure to sounds, musicians had habituation of the P3a, while nonmusicians showed enhancement of the P3a between blocks. Between active tasks, P3b amplitudes for duration deviants were reduced (habituated) in musicians only, and showed a more posterior scalp topography for habituation when compared to P3bs of nonmusicians. In both groups, the P3a and P3b latencies were shortened for deviating sounds. Also, musicians were better than nonmusicians at discriminating target deviants. Regardless of musical training, better discrimination was associated with higher working memory capacity. We concluded that music training enhances short-term P3a/P3b plasticity, indicating training-induced changes in attentional skills.     

Preattentive auditory context effects

The effects of auditory context on the preattentive and perceptual organization of tone sequences were investigated. Two sets of experiments were conducted in which the pitch of contextual tones was varied, bringing about two different contextual manipulations. Preattentive auditory organization was indexed by the mismatch negativity event-related potential, which is elicited by violations of auditory regularities even when participants ignore the sounds (e.g., by reading a book). The perceptual effects of the contextual manipulations on auditory grouping were assessed using target-detection and orderjudgment tasks. The close correspondence found between the effects of auditory context on the perceptual and preattentive measures of auditory grouping suggests that a large part of contextual processing is preattentive.     

Enhanced development of auditory change detection in musically trained school‐aged children: a longitudinal event‐related potential study

Adult musicians show superior auditory discrimination skills when compared to non‐musicians. The enhanced auditory skills of musicians are reflected in the augmented amplitudes of their auditory event‐related potential (ERP) responses. In the current study, we investigated longitudinally the development of auditory discrimination skills in musically trained and nontrained individuals. To this end, we recorded the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a responses from children who play a musical instrument and age‐matched children with no musical training at ages 7, 9, 11, and 13. Basic auditory processing was investigated by recording ERPs in the Multi‐Feature Paradigm that included frequency, duration, intensity, location, and gap deviants. The detection of musically more relevant sound changes was examined in an oddball paradigm with major chords as standards and minor chords as deviants. The musically trained children showed larger increase in MMN and P3a amplitudes with age for the chord deviants than the control children. There was also a strong trend (p = .054) for larger increase in MMN amplitude in the musically trained children for the location deviant. As no group differences in response amplitudes were evident at the early stages of the training, our results suggest that the superior neural auditory discrimination in adult musicians is due to training and not pre‐existing differences between musicians and non‐musicians.     

Superior formation of cortical memory traces for melodic patterns in musicians

The human central auditory system has a remarkable ability to establish memory traces for invariant features in the acoustic environment despite continual acoustic variations in the sounds heard. By recording the memory-related mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory electric and magnetic brain responses as well as behavioral performance, we investigated how subjects learn to discriminate changes in a melodic pattern presented at several frequency levels. In addition, we explored whether musical expertise facilitates this learning. Our data show that especially musicians who perform music primarily without a score learn easily to detect contour changes in a melodic pattern presented at variable frequency levels. After learning, their auditory cortex detects these changes even when their attention is directed away from the sounds. The present results thus show that, after perceptual learning during attentive listening has taken place, changes in a highly complex auditory pattern can be detected automatically by the human auditory cortex and, further, that this process is facilitated by musical expertise.     

Practice strategies of musicians modulate neural processing and the learning of sound-patterns

Previous studies suggest that pre-attentive auditory processing of musicians differs depending on the strategies used in music practicing and performance. This study aimed at systematically revealing whether there are differences in auditory processing between musicians preferring and not-preferring aural strategies such as improvising, playing by ear, and rehearsing by listening to records. Participants were assigned to aural and non-aural groups according to how much they employ aural strategies, as determined by a questionnaire. The change-related mismatch negativity (MMN) component of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) was used to probe pre-attentive neural discrimination of simple sound features and melody-like patterns. Further, the musicians' behavioral accuracy in sound perception was tested with a discrimination task and the AMMA musicality test. The data indicate that practice strategies do not affect musicians' pre-attentive neural discrimination of changes in simple sound features but do modulate the speed of neural discrimination of interval and contour changes within melody-like patterns. Moreover, while the aural and non-aural groups did not differ in their initial neural accuracy for discriminating melody-like patterns, they differed after a focused training session. A correlation between behavioral and neural measures was also obtained. Taken together, these results suggest that auditory processing of musicians who prefer aural practice strategies differs in melodic contour and interval processing and perceptual learning, rather than in simple sound processing, in comparison to musicians preferring other practice strategies.     

Correction to: Brain oscillation recordings of the audience in a live concert-like setting

Cognitive Processing -     

Brain oscillation recordings of the audience in a live concert-like setting

Cognitive Processing - There are only a few previous EEG studies that were conducted while the audience is listening to live music. However, in laboratory settings using music recordings, EEG...