Part IV: Developmental and Applied Perspectives on Music

Abstract

In recent years the burgeoning interest in music cognition has spawned intriguing questions about the ontogenesis of musical skills. It has also raised questions about the musical and nonmusical consequences of musical exposure or training. With respect to the first question, we have learned that human infants begin life with various musically relevant abilities, including fine-grained perception of pitch and rhythm patterns,1,2 preferences for consonant over dissonant intervals,3–5 cross-modal correspondences between sound and movement,6 and heightened responsiveness to the expressively sung performances of mothers.7–11 We have also learned that exposure to the music of their culture not only builds upon infants’ initial biases but also reshapes them.12–14 The collection of papers in this section focuses on a variety of issues related to shortor long-term musical exposure or training. There is a long-standing belief that musical training early in life has a greater impact than comparable training later on, presumably because of the plasticity of young brains. The notion is analogous to critical, sensitive, or optimal periods that have been proposed for the acquisition of phonological and syntactic aspects of language.15,16 Although there is clear evidence of age-related changes in the plasticity of the central auditory system,17,18 evidence of sensitive periods for perceptual learning is much less clear. It is possible that enhanced learning at particular phases of life stems from lack of expertise or neural commitment in particular domains, which enables new learning to proceed without interference from prior learning.19,20 For music in particular, there is little evidence that very early training is essential for high levels of ultimate musical achievement.21,22 One phenomenon that implicates early training, however, is absolute pitch, which involves the ability to learn and retain arbitrary verbal labels for isolated musical pitches.23–25 In any case, there is increasing interest in the neural consequences of early musical training.26 Although it is of interest to document these consequences, it is of greater importance to determine whether the neural changes have functional correlates. For obvious reasons, there is unabated interest in the general cognitive consequences of music lessons in childhood,27 despite inconsistent findings across