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required to attend to the sound stimulation.^62 –^64 Recently it was also investigated whether
musical expertise may be reflected in the auditory ERPs during a performance of a paral-
lel task in another modality. The first set of these studies addressed the accuracy of the vio-
lin players’and, more generally, the musicians’auditory system to process slight pitch
changes. In the first study, 3-part major chords with a perfect major were used as the stan-
dard stimulus.^65 The deviant stimulus was the same chord as the standard stimulus, except
that the middle tone of the chord was marginally mistuned (1 per cent), leading the
chord towards a minor chord. This stimulation was presented to subjects while they were
reading a book (the first and third blocks of the experiment; reading condition) and while
they were asked to detect the deviant chords (the second block; discrimination condition).
In the reading condition, the deviants elicited the MMN only in musicians. In the discrim-
ination condition, nonmusicians detected about 10 per cent and musicians about 80 per cent
of the deviant chords. In this condition, the parallel ERP recordings showed a significant
MMN followed by N2b and P3b deflections in musicians. This N2b–P3 complex reflects
higher cognitive processes concerned with the conscious detection and evaluation of
deviants. Nonmusicians had a small (but statistically significant) MMN without a subse-
quently elicited N2b or P3. The third block was presented to see whether the intermediate
attentive task facilitated subjects’automatic pitch processing. This, however, was not the
case. Musicians showed a MMN that did not differ from that elicited in the first block while
nonmusicians showed no MMN. These results suggest that professional violin players
automatically are able to detect tiny pitch changes in auditory information, which were
undetectable for nonmusicians and, further, that these automatic functions could not be
modified by attentional manipulations. Interestingly, the MMN evoked by a small (1 per
cent) or large (10 per cent) pitch change in pure sinusoidal tones did not differentiate vio-
linists and nonmusicians. This suggests that the superior pitch processing accuracy of the
violinists was activated only when the pitch change was presented among musical sounds.
In the subsequent experiment the superiority of musicians in automatic and attentive
pitch discrimination, originally observed in violin players,^65 was further investigated.^66
Thirteen professional musicians (guitarists, pianists, and wind instrument players) and
13 nonmusicians were presented with harmonically rich sounds of 300 ms in duration.
Standard sounds were of 528 Hz in fundamental frequency while deviant sounds were 0.7,
2, or 4 per cent higher. It was found that in the discrimination condition, the musicians
detected the pitch changes faster and more accurately than the nonmusicians. This was
reflected also in their P3b component, which was significantly larger in musicians than in
nonmusicians. However, the event-related brain responses recorded during the reading
condition showed a different data pattern—the MMN or P3a amplitude or latency did not
differ between the musicians and nonmusicians.
To summarize, the data reviewed above on pitch discrimination in violin players suggest
that musical expertise is reflected at preattentive cortical auditory processing especially
when the sound structure is musically relevant and when the stimulus change is of musi-
cally relevant magnitude. However, in musicians with other instrumental training, despite
their superiority in pitch discrimination during attentional listening, preattentive neural
mechanisms were not enhanced when compared with those of nonmusicians. This implies
that automated neural functions in pitch discrimination are most sensitive in musicians
who most consistently need such ability. In other musicians, such a sensitivity to pitch