Abstract
Musicians are trained in melodic transposition, the skill of extracting the pitch interval structure (i.e., the frequency ratios between pitches) and moving it into different keys (i.e., different pitch levels). This ability to recognize whether a melody is the same or altered when it is played back in a different key is correlated with both greater neural activation and cortical thickness in bilateral intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Musical training only explains part of this finding, suggesting that the ability to transpose a melody may have innate predispositions. The current study was designed to address this question: are the anatomical correlates of musical transposition already present in non-musician children at 14 years of age? If so, is there any evidence that those traits were already in place at earlier ages? To answer this question, we recruited 47 adolescents (age 14.5 years) from a longitudinal study and tested them on a melodic transposition task. These adolescents had already undergone anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at the ages of 10 (Time 1), 11.5 (Time 2), 13 (Time 3) years, as well as at age 14.5 years (Time 4) They were tested on the transposition task during Time-4 visit. During this visit, we found a relationship between cortical thickness in left IPS and performance on the transposed melody task in the girls and not the boys; no such relationship was observed at any of the earlier ages. Given that girls reach more advanced staged of pubertal maturation earlier than boys, it is possible that the relationship between cortical thickness in IPS and skill at melodic transposition only emerges once the brain has reached a certain degree of maturity. This claim is supported by a lack of similar sex differences in the adults: the degree of correlation between cortical thickness and performance on the same transposed melody task did not differ between men and women in a previous study. Taken together, our results suggest that the relationship between cortical thickness and the ability to transpose a melody is not fixed, and that the effects observed in adults are neither due exclusively to training nor to predisposition.
Highlights
Musicians have spent years developing a very specific set of skills in auditory, motor and cognitive domains, which are reflected to some extent in the structural brain differences between them and their non-musician counterparts (Schlaug et al, 1995a,b; Gaser and Schlaug, 2003; Bermudez et al, 2009)
We found, as predicted, that cortical thickness in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) is correlated with behavioral performance on a melodic transposition task at age 14.5; this effect was only seen in girls and not boys, and only observed on the left side
This study explores the possibility of predicting current behavior based on past neuroanatomical data. Such a method is potentially beneficial as it can answer one of the most -posed questions regarding a relationship between neuroanatomy and behavior: Maybe they were just born that way?! The results of the current study suggest that there may not be any neuroanatomical precursors for this particular structure-function relationship, at least in our sample of adolescent non-musicians
Summary
Musicians have spent years developing a very specific set of skills in auditory, motor and cognitive domains, which are reflected to some extent in the structural brain differences between them and their non-musician counterparts (Schlaug et al, 1995a,b; Gaser and Schlaug, 2003; Bermudez et al, 2009) One of these skills is melodic transposition, which occurs when a certain melody retains its pitch interval structure (i.e., the frequency ratios between pitches stay the same) but the pitches themselves are changed. A functional imaging study (Foster and Zatorre, 2010b) investigating this particular skill used a simple same/different task: Participants with varying degrees of musical training listened to two melodies, the second of which was either transposed to a different key, or presented in the same key in a control condition This second melody was either an exact transposition, or maintained the contour but changed one of the intervals. A contrast of the transposed and same-key melody conditions showed functional magnetic
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