Professional musicians listen differently to music

INTRODUCTION: Experience-based adaptation of emotional responses is an important faculty for cognitive and emotional functioning. Professional musicians represent an ideal model in which to elicit experience-driven changes in the emotional processing domain. The changes of the central representation of emotional arousal due to musical expertise are still largely unknown. The aim of the present study was to investigate the electroencephalogram (EEG) correlates of experience-driven changes in the domain of emotional arousal. Therefore, the differences in perceived (subjective arousal via ratings) and physiologically measured (EEG) arousal between amateur and professional musicians were examined. PROCEDURE: A total of 15 professional and 19 amateur musicians listened to the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's 5th symphony (duration=∼7.4min), during which a continuous 76-channel EEG was recorded. In a second session, the participants evaluated their emotional arousal during listening. In a tonic analysis, we examined the average EEG data over the time course of the music piece. For a phasic analysis, a fast Fourier transform was performed and covariance maps of spectral power were computed in association with the subjective arousal ratings. RESULTS: The subjective arousal ratings of the professional musicians were more consistent than those of the amateur musicians. In the tonic EEG analysis, a mid-frontal theta activity was observed in the professionals. In the phasic EEG, the professionals exhibited an increase of posterior alpha, central delta, and beta rhythm during high arousal. DISCUSSION: Professionals exhibited different and/or more intense patterns of emotional activation when they listened to the music. The results of the present study underscore the impact of music experience on emotional reactions.

Musical Training Induces Functional Plasticity in Human Hippocampus

Training can change the functional and structural organization of the brain, and animal models demonstrate that the hippocampus formation is particularly susceptible to training-related neuroplasticity. In humans, however, direct evidence for functional plasticity of the adult hippocampus induced by training is still missing. Here, we used musicians' brains as a model to test for plastic capabilities of the adult human hippocampus. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging optimized for the investigation of auditory processing, we examined brain responses induced by temporal novelty in otherwise isochronous sound patterns in musicians and musical laypersons, since the hippocampus has been suggested previously to be crucially involved in various forms of novelty detection. In the first cross-sectional experiment, we identified enhanced neural responses to temporal novelty in the anterior left hippocampus of professional musicians, pointing to expertise-related differences in hippocampal processing. In the second experiment, we evaluated neural responses to acoustic temporal novelty in a longitudinal approach to disentangle training-related changes from predispositional factors. For this purpose, we examined an independent sample of music academy students before and after two semesters of intensive aural skills training. After this training period, hippocampal responses to temporal novelty in sounds were enhanced in musical students, and statistical interaction analysis of brain activity changes over time suggests training rather than predisposition effects. Thus, our results provide direct evidence for functional changes of the adult hippocampus in humans related to musical training.