Musical expertise affects neural bases of letter recognition

It is known that early music learning (playing of an instrument) modifies functional brain structure (both white and gray matter) and connectivity, especially callosal transfer, motor control/coordination and auditory processing. We compared visual processing of notes and words in 15 professional musicians and 15 controls by recording their synchronized bioelectrical activity (ERPs) in response to words and notes. We found that musical training in childhood (from age ～8 years) modifies neural mechanisms of word reading, whatever the genetic predisposition, which was unknown. While letter processing was strongly left-lateralized in controls, the fusiform (BA37) and inferior occipital gyri (BA18) were activated in both hemispheres in musicians for both word and music processing. The evidence that the neural mechanism of letter processing differed in musicians and controls (being absolutely bilateral in musicians) suggests that musical expertise modifies the neural mechanisms of letter reading.     

The neuroscience of musical improvisation

Researchers have recently begun to examine the neural basis of musical improvisation, one of the most complex forms of creative behavior. The emerging field of improvisation neuroscience has implications not only for the study of artistic expertise, but also for understanding the neural underpinnings of domain-general processes such as motor control and language production. This review synthesizes functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) studies of musical improvisation, including vocal and instrumental improvisation, with samples of jazz pianists, classical musicians, freestyle rap artists, and non-musicians. A network of prefrontal brain regions commonly linked to improvisatory behavior is highlighted, including the pre-supplementary motor area, medial prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and dorsal premotor cortex. Activation of premotor and lateral prefrontal regions suggests that a seemingly unconstrained behavior may actually benefit from motor planning and cognitive control. Yet activation of cortical midline regions points to a role of spontaneous cognition characteristic of the default network. Together, such results may reflect cooperation between large-scale brain networks associated with cognitive control and spontaneous thought. The improvisation literature is integrated with Pressing's theoretical model, and discussed within the broader context of research on the brain basis of creative cognition.     

The sound of music: differentiating musicians using a fast, musical multi-feature mismatch negativity paradigm

Musicians' skills in auditory processing depend highly on instrument, performance practice, and on level of expertise. Yet, it is not known though whether the style/genre of music might shape auditory processing in the brains of musicians. Here, we aimed at tackling the role of musical style/genre on modulating neural and behavioral responses to changes in musical features. Using a novel, fast and musical sounding multi-feature paradigm, we measured the mismatch negativity (MMN), a pre-attentive brain response, to six types of musical feature change in musicians playing three distinct styles of music (classical, jazz, rock/pop) and in non-musicians. Jazz and classical musicians scored higher in the musical aptitude test than band musicians and non-musicians, especially with regards to tonal abilities. These results were extended by the MMN findings: jazz musicians had larger MMN-amplitude than all other experimental groups across the six different sound features, indicating a greater overall sensitivity to auditory outliers. In particular, we found enhanced processing of pith and sliding up to pitches in jazz musicians only. Furthermore, we observed a more frontal MMN to pitch and location compared to the other deviants in jazz musicians and left lateralization of the MMN to timbre in classical musicians. These findings indicate that the characteristics of the style/genre of music played by musicians influence their perceptual skills and the brain processing of sound features embedded in a musical context. Musicians' brain is hence shaped by the type of training, musical style/genre, and listening experiences.     

Constructing a grounded theory of young people's recovery of musical identity in mental illness

Musical identity is a highly relevant, yet little researched area within mental illness. In this study, the researchers explore how 11 young people's musical identities changed during their experiences of, and recovery from mental illness. The researchers use a constructivist grounded theory approach to collect and analyse in-depth interviews with young people attending a music therapy programme at a youth mental health service. Findings are presented as a constructivist grounded theory of young people's recovery of musical identity. This interpretation illustrates how aspects of these young people's pathology presents as ‘musical symptoms’ during acute illness and the ways in which young people engage in processes of ‘bridging’ and ‘playing out’ musical identity in the community. The role of music therapy in supporting young people's recovery from mental illness is presented, and the need to consider community-based music services is discussed.     

The perception of musical phrase structure: a cross-cultural ERP study

Electroencephalography (EEG) was used in a cross-cultural music study investigating phrase boundary perception. Chinese and German musicians performed a cultural categorization task under Chinese and Western music listening conditions. Western music was the major subject for both groups of musicians, while Chinese music was familiar to Chinese subjects only. By manipulating the presence of pauses between two phrases in the biphrasal melodies, EEG correlates for the perception of phrase boundaries were found in both groups under both music listening conditions. Between 450 and 600 ms, the music CPS (closure positive shift), which had been found in earlier studies with a false tone detection task, was replicated for the more global categorization task and for all combinations of subject group and musical style. At short latencies (100 and 450 ms post phrase boundary offset), EEG correlates varied as a function of musical styles and subject group. Both bottom-up (style properties of the music) and top-down (acculturation of the subjects) information interacted during this early processing stage.     

Towards a standard model of musical improvisation

Musical improvisation is a sophisticated cognitive process that combines creativity, goal‐directed action, sensory monitoring and social interaction. With a renewed interest in quantifying creative processes facilitated by recent advances in neuroimaging technology, musical improvisation has emerged as an ideal paradigm to study creativity. However, many studies isolate the top‐down processes related to creativity from those related to production and auditory perception, leaving the question of how creative behaviours integrate sensory information with higher cognitive processes unanswered. The bottom‐up neural correlates of music perception have been extensively quantified, comprising networks for auditory processing and parsing semantic and syntactic content. In studies of spontaneously generated music and domain‐general creativity, executive control and goal‐directed movement networks are added to the perceptual foundation. This review summarises previous work on music perception and improvisation and presents a conceptual model of musical improvisation with known neural correlates. We make recommendations on future directions for the study of improvisation and discuss the challenges posed by this endeavour.     

A musical assessment of psychiatric states in adults

In music therapy, joint musical improvisation of therapist and subject provides the framework for a spontaneous and intimate, non-verbal interaction. This study shows that such an interaction can be used to reveal the subject's capacity for emotional contact with another person, the nature of this contact and how well it is sustained. We examine the musical interaction in first music therapy sessions using a model of analysis specially developed for this study. A comparison between 15 schizophrenics, 15 depressed patients and 15 clinically normal controls revealed significant differences. The findings, which take into account subjects' musical background and perceptual functioning, have implications for the diagnostic use of music therapy in adult psychiatry.     

Importance of the left auditory areas in chord discrimination in music experts as demonstrated by MEG

The brain basis behind musical competence in its various forms is not yet known. To determine the pattern of hemispheric lateralization during sound‐change discrimination, we recorded the magnetic counterpart of the electrical mismatch negativity (MMNm) responses in professional musicians, musical participants (with high scores in the musicality tests but without professional training in music) and non‐musicians. While watching a silenced video, they were presented with short sounds with frequency and duration deviants and C major chords with C minor chords as deviants. MMNm to chord deviants was stronger in both musicians and musical participants than in non‐musicians, particularly in their left hemisphere. No group differences were obtained in the MMNm strength in the right hemisphere in any of the conditions or in the left hemisphere in the case of frequency or duration deviants. Thus, in addition to professional training in music, musical aptitude (combined with lower‐level musical training) is also reflected in brain functioning related to sound discrimination. The present magnetoencephalographic evidence therefore indicates that the sound discrimination abilities may be differentially distributed in the brain in musically competent and naïve participants, especially in a musical context established by chord stimuli: the higher forms of musical competence engage both auditory cortices in an integrative manner.     

Playing piano in the mind--an fMRI study on music imagery and performance in pianists

Reading of musical notes and playing piano is a very complex motor task which requires years of practice. In addition to motor skills, rapid and effective visuomotor transformation as well as processing of the different components of music like pitch, rhythm and musical texture are involved. The aim of the present study was the investigation of the cortical network which mediates music performance compared to music imagery in 12 music academy students playing the right hand part of a Bartok piece using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In both conditions, fMRI activations of a bilateral frontoparietal network comprising the premotor areas, the precuneus and the medial part of Brodmann Area 40 were found. During music performance but not during imagery the contralateral primary motor cortex and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) bilaterally was active. This reflects the role of primary motor cortex for motor execution but not imagery and the higher visuomotor integration requirements during music performance compared to simulation. The notion that the same areas are involved in visuomotor transformation/motor planning and music processing emphasizes the multimodal properties of cortical areas involved in music and motor imagery in musicians.     

Neural discrimination of nonprototypical chords in music experts and laymen: an MEG study

At the level of the auditory cortex, musicians discriminate pitch changes more accurately than nonmusicians. However, it is not agreed upon how sound familiarity and musical expertise interact in the formation of pitch-change discrimination skills, that is, whether musicians possess musical pitch discrimination abilities that are generally more accurate than in nonmusicians or, alternatively, whether they may be distinguished from nonmusicians particularly with respect to the discrimination of nonprototypical sounds that do not play a reference role in Western tonal music. To resolve this, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the change-related magnetic mismatch response (MMNm) in musicians and nonmusicians to two nonprototypical chords, a "dissonant" chord containing a highly unpleasant interval and a "mistuned" chord including a mistuned pitch, and a minor chord, all inserted in a context of major chords. Major and minor are the most frequently used chords in Western tonal music which both musicians and nonmusicians are most familiar with, whereas the other chords are more rarely encountered in tonal music. The MMNm was stronger in musicians than in nonmusicians in response to the dissonant and mistuned chords, whereas no group difference was found in the MMNm strength to minor chords. Correspondingly, the length of musical training correlated with the MMNm strength for the dissonant and mistuned chords only. Our findings provide evidence for superior automatic discrimination of nonprototypical chords in musicians. Most likely, this results from a highly sophisticated auditory system in musicians allowing a more efficient discrimination of chords deviating from the conventional categories of tonal music.     

Predictive coding of music - Brain responses to rhythmic incongruity

During the last decades, models of music processing in the brain have mainly discussed the specificity of brain modules involved in processing different musical components. We argue that predictive coding offers an explanatory framework for functional integration in musical processing. Further, we provide empirical evidence for such a network in the analysis of event-related MEG-components to rhythmic incongruence in the context of strong metric anticipation. This is seen in a mismatch negativity (MMNm) and a subsequent P3am component, which have the properties of an error term and a subsequent evaluation in a predictive coding framework. There were both quantitative and qualitative differences in the evoked responses in expert jazz musicians compared with rhythmically unskilled non-musicians. We propose that these differences trace a functional adaptation and/or a genetic pre-disposition in experts which allows for a more precise rhythmic prediction.     

Beyond Perception: Musical Representation and On-line Processing in Autism

Whilst findings from experimental studies suggest that perceptual mechanisms underpinning musical cognition are preserved or enhanced in autism, little is known about how higher-level, structural aspects of music are processed. Twenty participants with autism, together with age and intelligence matched controls, completed a musical priming task in which global and local musical contexts were manipulated. The results from the study revealed no between-group differences and showed that both global and local musical contexts influenced participants’ congruity judgements. The findings were interpreted within the context of studies showing weakened sensitivity to verbal/semantic information in autism.     

Musicians and the gamma band: a secret affair?

While listening to music, a significant high degree of phase synchrony in the gamma frequency range globally distributed over the brain was found in subjects with musical training (musicians) compared with subjects with no such training (non-musicians). No significant differences were found in other EEG frequency bands. Listening to neutral text did not produce any significant differences in the degree of synchronization between these two groups. For musicians, left-hemispheric dominance was found during listening to music. The right hemisphere was found to be dominant for non-musicians in text listening. The high degree of synchronization in musicians could be due to their high ability to retrieve musical patterns from their acoustic memory, which is a cogent condition for both listening to and anticipating musical sounds.     

Cortical regions involved in the generation of musical structures during improvisation in pianists

Studies on simple pseudorandom motor and cognitive tasks have shown that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and rostral premotor areas are involved in free response selection. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate whether these brain regions are also involved in free generation of responses in a more complex creative behavior: musical improvisation. Eleven professional pianists participated in the study. In one condition, Improvise, the pianist improvised on the basis of a visually displayed melody. In the control condition, Reproduce, the participant reproduced his previous improvisation from memory. Participants were able to reproduce their improvisations with a high level of accuracy, and the contrast Improvise versus Reproduce was thus essentially matched in terms of motor output and sensory feedback. However, the Improvise condition required storage in memory of the improvisation. We therefore also included a condition FreeImp, where the pianist improvised but was instructed not to memorize his performance. To locate brain regions involved in musical creation, we investigated the activations in the Improvise-Reproduce contrast that were also present in FreeImp contrasted with a baseline rest condition. Activated brain regions included the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the presupplementary motor area, the rostral portion of the dorsal premotor cortex, and the left posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus. We suggest that these regions are part of a network involved in musical creation, and discuss their possible functional roles.     

A woman's voice: The politics of gender identity in music therapy and everyday life

In contrast to a comparative model of gender that implies that gender is something you have, a performative model of gender points towards gender as something that is construed in relationship and in context. From this perspective music therapy can be understood as an arena for performance and negotiations of gender. In this process, music therapy can conceal a range of socio-cultural and political dimensions significant in how people manage their sense of self, health, and well-being. This article explores how gender and sexuality are located through singing as a musical act and cultural gesture, and how the social presence of the voice is implicated in sexual politics. Using the experiences of a young woman in music therapy as a point of departure, this article examines the notion of interrupted voices in everyday life and therapy.     

Implicit Learning and Acquisition of Music

Implicit learning is a core process for the acquisition of a complex, rule‐based environment from mere interaction, such as motor action, skill acquisition, or language. A body of evidence suggests that implicit knowledge governs music acquisition and perception in nonmusicians and musicians, and that both expert and nonexpert participants acquire complex melodic, harmonic, and other features from mere exposure. While current findings and computational modeling largely support the learning of chunks, some results indicate learning of more complex structures. Despite the body of evidence, more research is required to support the cross‐cultural validity of implicit learning and to show that core and more complex music theoretical features are acquired implicitly.     

Music therapy in children's hospices: An evaluative survey of provision

This paper presents the results of a survey of the range of music therapy practice in children's hospices in the UK. Music therapists are challenged to work with children with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions during short periods of respite care over several years or at end of life. Flexibility is fundamental to working both individually and in small groups in response to the shifting needs of the children and their families. In the context of a children's hospice music therapists are called upon to work creatively with siblings and family members and members of the multidisciplinary team in addition to the children themselves. A questionnaire and focus group for music therapists working in the children's hospices provided evidence of the range of work, priorities and future plans for development. Telephone interviews with specialist staff at children's hospices where music therapists were not currently working provided evidence of how music and musical activities were perceived and utilised, with any plans for future provision for a music therapy service and some of the practical and resource issues being itemised.     

The Role of Music in a Salutogenic Approach to Health

This article introduces the reader to the role of music in a salutogenic approach to health, focusing on lay musical practice in public health policy and mental health promotion. Several participants reported how they used music as an alternative to medication or medical treatment, often transcending pain and suffering through personal, musical practices. The participants described how musicking can enhance coping mechanisms, providing a sense of coherence and zest for life, for example how using music may activate individuals in difficult periods in their lives, and retrieve or mobilise a stronger self. Individuals have learned how listening, playing and singing for self or others can be used as a ‘technology’ to achieve a sense of wholeness in body and mind, often described as ‘musicking’. According to mood, context, need or situation, it is the combination of musical practices, properties and activities that tends to produce a personal or social healing effect.     

Neural basis of music imagery and the effect of musical expertise

Although the influence of long‐term musical training on the processing of heard music has been the subject of many studies, the neural basis of music imagery and the effect of musical expertise remain insufficiently understood. By means of magnetoencephalography (MEG) we compared musicians and nonmusicians in a musical imagery task with familiar melodies. Subjects listened to the beginnings of the melodies, continued them in their imagination and then heard a tone which was either a correct or an incorrect further continuation of the melody. Only in musicians was the imagery of these melodies strong enough to elicit an early preattentive brain response to unexpected incorrect continuations of the imagined melodies; this response, the imagery mismatch negativity (iMMN), peaked ～175 ms after tone onset and was right‐lateralized. In contrast to previous studies the iMMN was not based on a heard but on a purely imagined memory trace. Our results suggest that in trained musicians imagery and perception rely on similar neuronal correlates, and that the musicians’ intense musical training has modified this network to achieve a superior ability for imagery and preattentive processing of music.