305employed in which the subject performed a parallel task outside the auditory modality
during the stimulation and brain recordings. Thus, these findings offer fundamental
insight to the brains’s ability to encode and differentiate acoustically complex sounds
despite the focus of the listener’s attention.
The results indicated, first, that the cortical networks are able to automatically
encode temporally and spectrally complex musical sounds as well as their abstract rela-
tions. Moreover, it was shown that pitch changes among spectrally complex sounds
and temporally complex sound patterns are more readily discriminated than equiva-
lent pitch changes among pure single sinusoidal sounds. These findings might rephrase
our views on the ability of the human brain to represent the continuously changing
sound environment beyond the ‘listener’s’attentional focus. In other words, although
music and music sounds are acoustically and cognitively demanding entities, majority
of relevant sound information is neurally encoded even if we are not consciously
aware of it.
Second, the loci of the cortical sound representations were found to differ between musi-
cal and phonetic sounds both within and between the cerebral hemispheres. This suggests
that the auditory cortex is able to represent not only the acoustical but also the informa-
tional sound content. Further, the data reviewed above imply that the tonality processing
as probed by neurocognition of chord cadences involves also the brain regions primarily
devoted to language, that is, the Broca’s area. These two lines of research may first seem to
be in conflict. However, the level of auditory material and thus the level of processing is not
comparable. While isolated sounds represent one fragment of an auditory scene, a chord
cadence is actually already an auditory scene of its own. In future, it will hopefully be pos-
sible to further illuminate the degree and timing of the neurocognitive modularity of
music and language processing.
Third, in several experimental paradigms, musical expertise was reflected in automati-
cally elicited brain responses to violations in pitch and temporal sound features as a
response enhancement and/or latency decrease. It was also indicated that musical expert-
ise does not guarantee facilitated neuronal processing of music sounds or sound sequences.
Based on the above reviewed findings (see also Ref. 73), it might be argued that the com-
monly used differentiation between ‘musicians’when contrasted with ‘nonmusicians’does
not necessarily provide a researcher with an accurate enough categorization. Preferably, we
should identify and subdivide musicians more accurately on the basis of their major instru-
ments (e.g. whether just or fixed tuning is used); the importance of pitch vs timing cues in
the genre and instrument, and their relationship to musical score. Also the quantity and
quality of the musical activities the ‘nonmusical’subjects have, for instance, in terms of
dance, sports, or music listening, should be taken into account. Hopefully, by optimizing
the contrasts between the subject groups in their relationship to music in its broadest
meaning, the purest forms of neurocognitive expertise in musicians could be more readily
unveiled.
To summarize, during past decade, plenitude of electromagnetic evidence together with
increasing number of hemodynamic data underlined the importance of the automatically
activated neural networks in the auditory cortex also in musically relevant forms of cogni-
tion. In future, our task is to further illuminate the degree of modularity in audition for