Studying musicians’ cognitive processing suggests that music training can bring about plastic changes in the human brain. This can be more clearly shown when
musicians and non-musicians are studied in parallel. Research suggests that
musicians’ brains appear to adapt physiologically to the music training the receive (Zatorre et al., 2007). However, the exact plastic changes are not yet very clear.
Musical skills have not been matched with specific circumscribed brain areas and
there is no established anatomy for musical processing (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003). A
closer look at brain structure and music cognitive function suggests that additional
systematic research can result in a possible mapping of cognitive functions in the
future.
Schlaug et al. (1995) investigated whether musical training affects intrahemispheric
relationships in individuals with this kind of experience. The corpus callosum, a
structure of fibres connecting the two cerebral hemispheres, was found to have a
different morphology in musicians in their study. Musicians were shown to have a
larger anterior part of the corpus callosum in contrast to non-musicians. This study
raises the issue of plasticity differences due to musical training in early childhood, as
these researchers looked at musicians with training that took place before the seventh
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music training, the study implies that a maturation period in the early years of life is
likely to exist. With respect to the relationship between memory for music and music
training, hemispheric differences also appear. For example, Ayotte et al. (2000)
argue that areas of the left hemisphere appear to be more strongly related to long-
term music representations, whereas areas of the right hemisphere seem to provide
access to these representations. This might imply that training -which contributes to
the formation of these long-term representations- might depend more on left-
hemisphere structures.
In comparison to non-musicians, musicians seem to display a different cognitive
response when they are exposed to pitch stimuli. Perception of frequencies is not a
process involving the same localisation for the whole range of different frequencies
(see 1.6). Tonotopy, a general function of the auditory system, shows a frequency-
dependent localisation in the cochlea and, at later stages, in the central auditory
pathway (Schonwiesner et al. 2002). This tonotopical representation means that
when one is exposed to an acoustic stimulus, a different frequency will activate a
different region of the cochlea. The same principle is the case for the cerebral cortex.
Music training has been argued to have an effect on how pitch stimuli activate
different parts of the cortex. Early investigations in differences in pitch processing in
musically educated participants and musically uneducated controls show anatomical
differences in the auditory cortex. More specifically, Pantev et al. (1998) found that
musicians that were exposed to piano tones displayed more extensive areas of
activation, according to the results of functional magnetic source imaging that
researchers used. This difference in representation was even larger in musicians
whose musical training started at a younger age compared to individuals that had
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Another question of pivotal importance in this area has been whether musical
training can create brain plasticity extending beyond the musical domain. As already
discussed, perception of contours differs from perception of specific intervals. Thus,
although pitch patterns in terms of direction are perceived more easily, the accuracy
needed in order to recognise specific intervallic relationships appears far more
demanding. Researchers in music cognition have looked at the effect of music
training on pitch processing not only in music but also in language. Besson et al.
(2007) used electrophysiological measurements to test the perception of pitch in
musicians and non-musicians, using both musical and linguistic stimuli. In these
stimuli the final note or word was manipulated so that the stimuli would become
incongruous. Moreover, there was variation in the amount of incongruity that was
created so that some melodies and utterances’ ending sounded very incongruous and
in some other cases slightly incongruous. Results showed that, in cases where
incongruities were easy to detect, musicians and non-musicians performed similarly.
However, for slight incongruities (such as 1/5 of tone manipulations) musicians
performed much higher on both the musical and also the linguistic tasks. These
results suggest that musical training can have an effect on pitch perception not only
in the musical but also in the linguistic domain. In other words, this skill seems to be
transferable to the linguistic domain without speech perception training.
The pitch acuity benefit acquired by music training seems to extend to languages that
one does not speak. Marques et al. (2007), a follow-up study similar to Besson et al.
(2007), used the same test in order to test perception of final-word incongruity in a
language that participants did not speak. French participants, musicians and non-
musicians, were exposed to sentences in an unknown language—Portuguese, in
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According to results, slight pitch incongruities were only perceivable by musicians
but not non-musicians. This means that slight sentence contour manipulations can be
perceived when one is musically trained even when it comes to a foreign language of
which they do not have any knowledge. As music pitch perception involves
processing of much smaller intervals compared to speech, musicians’ ability to perceive fine-grained manipulations in music might be transferred to the speech
domain. Hence, this transfer effect does not seem to be linked to the lexical aspect of
speech and it is not surprising that musicians are sensitive to this kind of
manipulations in foreign languages.
The results of these studies and other studies on similar topics are likely to be biased
in favour of a critical contribution of music training to musical intelligence and
cognitive performance in general. However, if one takes into consideration that
music ability is not a single cognitive entity but rather is comprised of multiple sub-
components (Peretz and Coltheart, 2003), there may be multiple effects of music
training to a range of music abilities that have not yet received scientific attention.
The question arises as to whether the range of music abilities can be divided into
categories concerning skills that are highly dependent on specific or early life
training and those that can develop in any human being after simple exposure to
musical input. Investigation of this issue might also lead to a clearer picture about
which musical abilities are specific to the music domain and which might relate to
other cognitive domains or to general cognitive abilities.
As musicianship offers the opportunity to study individuals with a long period of
specific training resulting in processing differences with non-musicians (Bangert et
al., 2006), this area is likely to produce even more fruitful research in the future. The
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from musicians and non-musicians literature with investigations focusing on those
musical abilities that may emerge as a result of simple exposure rather than long-
term musical training.