Dataset Information

Musicians demonstrate experience-dependent brainstem enhancement of musical scale features within continuously gliding pitch.

ABSTRACT: In contrast to language, where pitch patterns consist of continuous and curvilinear contours, musical pitch consists of relatively discrete, stair-stepped sequences of notes. Behavioral and neurophysiological studies suggest that both tone-language and music experience enhance the representation of pitch cues associated with a listener's domain of expertise, e.g., curvilinear pitch in language, discrete scale steps in music. We compared brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) of English-speaking musicians (musical pitch experience) and native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (linguistic pitch experience) elicited by rising and falling tonal sweeps that are exemplary of Mandarin tonal contours but uncharacteristic of the pitch patterns typically found in music. In spite of musicians' unfamiliarity with such glides, we find that their brainstem FFRs show enhancement of the stimulus where the curvilinear sweep traverses discrete notes along the diatonic musical scale. This enhancement was note specific in that it was not observed immediately preceding or following the scale tone of interest (passing note). No such enhancements were observed in Chinese listeners. These findings suggest that the musician's brainstem may be differentially tuned by long-term exposure to the pitch patterns inherent to music, extracting pitch in relation to a fixed, hierarchical scale.

SUBMITTER: Bidelman GM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3196385 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Musicians demonstrate experience-dependent brainstem enhancement of musical scale features within continuously gliding pitch.

Bidelman Gavin M GM Gandour Jackson T JT Krishnan Ananthanarayan A

Neuroscience letters 20110830 3

In contrast to language, where pitch patterns consist of continuous and curvilinear contours, musical pitch consists of relatively discrete, stair-stepped sequences of notes. Behavioral and neurophysiological studies suggest that both tone-language and music experience enhance the representation of pitch cues associated with a listener's domain of expertise, e.g., curvilinear pitch in language, discrete scale steps in music. We compared brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) of English-s ...[more]

PMID: 21906656

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Project description:PURPOSE:To investigate if, regardless of language background (tonal or non-tonal), musicians may show stronger CP than non-musicians; To examine if native speakers of English (English or non-tonal musicians henceforth) or Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin or tonal musicians henceforth) can better accommodate multiple functions of the same acoustic cue and if musicians' sensitivity to pitch of lexical tones comes at the cost of slower processing. METHOD:English and Mandarin Musicians and non-musicians performed a categorical identification and a discrimination task on rising and falling continua of fundamental frequency on two vowels with 9 duration values. RESULTS:Non-tonal musicians exhibited significantly stronger categorical perception of pitch contour than non-tonal non-musicians. However, tonal musicians did not consistently perceive the two types of pitch directions more categorically than tonal non-musicians. Both tonal and non-tonal musicians also benefited more from increasing stimulus duration in processing pitch changes than non-musicians and they generally require less time for pitch processing. Musicians were also more sensitive to intrinsic F0 in pitch perception and differences of pitch types. CONCLUSION:The effect of musical training strengthens categorical perception more consistently in non-tonal speakers than tonal speakers. Overall, musicians benefit more from increased stimulus duration, due perhaps to their greater sensitivity to temporal information, thus allowing them to be better at forming a more robust auditory representation and matching sounds to internalized memory templates. Musicians also attended more to acoustic details such as intrinsic F0 and pitch types in pitch processing, and yet, overall, their categorization of pitch was not compromised by traces of these acoustic details from their auditory short-term working memory. These findings may lead to a better understanding of pitch perception deficits in special populations, particularly among individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Project description:The strong association between music and speech has been supported by recent research focusing on musicians' superior abilities in second language learning and neural encoding of foreign speech sounds. However, evidence for a double association--the influence of linguistic background on music pitch processing and disorders--remains elusive. Because languages differ in their usage of elements (e.g., pitch) that are also essential for music, a unique opportunity for examining such language-to-music associations comes from a cross-cultural (linguistic) comparison of congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder affecting the music (pitch and rhythm) processing of about 5% of the Western population. In the present study, two populations (Hong Kong and Canada) were compared. One spoke a tone language in which differences in voice pitch correspond to differences in word meaning (in Hong Kong Cantonese, /si/ means 'teacher' and 'to try' when spoken in a high and mid pitch pattern, respectively). Using the On-line Identification Test of Congenital Amusia, we found Cantonese speakers as a group tend to show enhanced pitch perception ability compared to speakers of Canadian French and English (non-tone languages). This enhanced ability occurs in the absence of differences in rhythmic perception and persists even after relevant factors such as musical background and age were controlled. Following a common definition of amusia (5% of the population), we found Hong Kong pitch amusics also show enhanced pitch abilities relative to their Canadian counterparts. These findings not only provide critical evidence for a double association of music and speech, but also argue for the reconceptualization of communicative disorders within a cultural framework. Along with recent studies documenting cultural differences in visual perception, our auditory evidence challenges the common assumption of universality of basic mental processes and speaks to the domain generality of culture-to-perception influences.

Dataset Information

Musicians demonstrate experience-dependent brainstem enhancement of musical scale features within continuously gliding pitch.

Publications

Musicians demonstrate experience-dependent brainstem enhancement of musical scale features within continuously gliding pitch.

Similar Datasets

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