Type of Music Training Selectively Influences Perceptual Processing

Music training influences both brain structure and function. Musicians who began their training before age six or seven have a larger left planum temporale and corpus callosum. String players have a larger cortical representation of the left hand. Piano, singing, or rhythm instruction before age seven improves performance on spatial-temporal tasks. We sought to determine how type of music training influences perceptual processing in adults. Forty-five participants were recruited in three groups of 15: non-musician controls, percussionists, and string players. On average, musicians had played for more than thirty years and had more than 16 years of formal instruction. Participants were tested on four discrimination tasks presented in random order: auditory duration, auditory frequency, visual duration, and visual frequency. Auditory stimuli were 44.1 KHz 16-bit sine waves. Visual stimuli were vertical gratings of sinusoidally-varying brightness convolved with a Gaussian filter. On each trial, a standard stimulus was presented followed by a comparison stimulus differing in duration or frequency. An adaptive staircase procedure made the discrimination harder after correct trials and easier after incorrect trials. Each task ended when twelve errors were made. The median of the last eleven errors was selected to represent each individual’s discrimination threshold. Planned comparisons were performed between groups using t-tests. On the auditory duration task, percussionists performed better than controls. On the auditory frequency task, string players performed better than controls. There were no statistically significant differences for the visual duration or visual frequency tasks, although there was a trend for both musician groups to perform better on the visual duration task. We conclude that type of music instruction selectively influences perceptual discrimination processes. Planned neuroimaging studies will determine the functional basis of these differential abilities.