Abstract
When compared with individuals without explicit training in music, adult musicians have facilitated neural functions in several modalities. They also display structural changes in various brain areas, these changes corresponding to the intensity and duration of their musical training. Previous studies have focused on investigating musicians with training in Western classical music. However, musicians involved in different musical genres may display highly differentiated auditory profiles according to the demands set by their genre, i.e., varying importance of different musical sound features. This hypothesis was tested in a novel melody paradigm including deviants in tuning, timbre, rhythm, melody transpositions, and melody contour. Using this paradigm while the participants were watching a silent video and instructed to ignore the sounds, we compared classical, jazz, and rock musicians' and non-musicians' accuracy of neural encoding of the melody. In all groups of participants, all deviants elicited an MMN response, which is a cortical index of deviance discrimination. The strength of the MMN and the subsequent attentional P3a responses reflected the importance of various sound features in each music genre: these automatic brain responses were selectively enhanced to deviants in tuning (classical musicians), timing (classical and jazz musicians), transposition (jazz musicians), and melody contour (jazz and rock musicians). Taken together, these results indicate that musicians with different training history have highly specialized cortical reactivity to sounds which violate the neural template for melody content.
Highlights
Musical expertise is reflected in the neural architecture of musicians
In the case of the low-level changes, we found out that mistuned sounds among the melody evoked a frontally enhanced mismatch negativity (MMN) especially in classical musicians when compared to non-musicians
We found that the timing delays in the end of the melody evoked a larger P3a in classical and jazz musicians when compared to non-musicians
Summary
Musical expertise is reflected in the neural architecture of musicians This is evidenced by both functional (for reviews, see Münte et al, 2002; Jäncke, 2009; Pantev and Herholz, 2011) and structural (e.g., Schlaug et al, 1995; Gaser and Schlaug, 2003; Bengtsson et al, 2005; Steele et al, 2013) findings in adult musicians as well as in children who received music training (Hyde et al, 2009; Putkinen et al, 2014). Electrical auditory brain potentials reflecting the successive stages of sound processing are either stronger and/or earlier in musicians than in non-musicians. These cortical reactions include P1 (Schneider et al, 2002), N1 (Pantev et al, 1998, 2001), and P2. MMN and P3a responses signal the neurocognitive discrepancy between the expected and the encountered sound information (MMN: Kujala et al, 2007; P3a: Escera et al, 2000)
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