The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

304     

pitch information or longer sound sequences, the musicians have more advanced encoding
ability even during a performance of a parallel task.
Recently it was also studied whether musicians and nonmusicians may encode melodic
transpositions without attentional effort.^72 The subjects were presented with short melodic
patterns of 0.5 s at 12 different frequency levels within one octave. In alternating order, the
experimental session consisted of three Ignore conditions (during which the subjects
watched a silent video with subtitles) and three Attentive conditions (during which they
detected a target with a different melody contour). The data indicated that especially musi-
cians who perform music mainly without a score easily learn to detect contour changes in
the pitch transposed melodic patterns (see Figure 19.3). However, even those musicians
had no MMN during the first Ignore condition, in other words, also they needed some con-
scious, explicit effort to learn to extract the melodic contour from the constantly varying
sound material. After learning, their auditory cortex detected violations from the standard
melodic contour even when their attention was directed away from the sounds.
Interestingly, all non-musicians and the ‘score-dependent musicians’were not assisted by
the presence of the active task.

Conclusions

The data reviewed above was acquired by electromagnetic and hemodynamic recordings
on healthy adult subjects. In majority of those studies, an experimental paradigm was

Figure 19.3Event-related potentials elicited by the standard (90 per cent; thin line) and the deviant (10 per cent;
thick line) melodic patterns. In the accurate subjects, an MMN was elicited during the second and third Ignore
conditions following the first attend condition (right column). In the inaccurate subjects, no MMN was observed
at any phase of the experiment despite intermediate attend conditions (left column). Adapted from Ref. 72.

First

Second

Third

Inaccurate subjects

MMN

MMN

Accurate subjects

• 3 μV Standard

Ignore condition

MMN to melody transposition

Deviant