investigations, the findings of which have often been as inconsistent as those of clinical
reports. Early studies used the technique of dichotic listening, in which the two ears simul-
taneously receive different auditory information. In one such investigation musically naïve
subjects appeared to have left ear advantage—that is, right cerebral hemispheric domi-
nance—listening to melodies, whereas musically sophisticated subjects had right ear advan-
tage; the findings were considered to reflect right hemispheric gestalt and emotional
processing on the part of naïve listeners, in contrast to left hemispheric detailed analysis on
the part of the musicians.^63 Other investigators, however, found no differences between
musically sophisticated and musically naïve subjects,64,65and in some reports differences
were found that seemed to depend on inherent musical aptitude,^66 age,^67 sex,^68 or right-ear
advantage for higher pitch.69,70In one study the right hemisphere was used more for melody
recognition when the tones had a complex timbre with rich overtones, again perhaps reflect-
ing a right hemispheric advantage in dealing with simultaneous or gestalt, rather than
linear or analytic, information.^71 It should be noted, however, that many investigators
consider dichotic listening a highly unreliable technique for defining hemispheric functional
‘dominance’.^72
In normal subjects, functional imaging—positron emission tomography (PET) and
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—allows different components of musical
processing to be assessed in real time. Such studies demonstrated that pitch recognition
selectively activates the right prefrontal cortex, whereas active retention of pitch requires
interaction of right frontal and right temporal cortices.73,74In another study, musical sight-
reading, unlike reading words, activated the left occipitoparietal cortex, perhaps reflecting
the dependence of musical reading on spatial location, in contrast to the dependence of
word reading on feature detection.^75 In another study subjects listened to the same piece
but were instructed to attend to different aspects of the music—for example, melody recog-
nition, pitch, rhythm, or how many instruments were playing; even though the auditory
information did not change with repeated trials, brain activation patterns were sharply
altered by such changes in selective attention.^76
As with brain-damaged patients, studies of normal subjects involve particular aspects of
musical experience—auditory (pitch, harmony, timbre, interval, contour), visual (nota-
tional score, which includes real words; notes designated by letter but represented spatially,
with duration indicated by appearance; purely musical symbols, such as rests, fermata,
clef, crescendo, staccato, and repeat; and display of both simultaneous and sequential
sounds), motor (performance, dance); memory; and emotion. Musical experience,
however, is more than the sum of these parts. The multimodal components of musical
processing cannot be sharply localized to one part of the brain or even to one cerebral
hemisphere. The psychological whole that emerges from their interaction is even more
widely distributed.References
1.Darwin, C.(1871) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Appleton.
2.Spencer, H.(1857/1951) The origin and function of music. In Literary Style and Music.New York:
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