Page 62 - Fall2020

MUSIC TRAINING CHANGES THE BRAIN
We briefly discuss the literature on music exposure and music aptitude before moving forward to examining music training.
Music Exposure
Humans begin to experience music (as well as speech) even before birth (Birnholz and Benacerraf, 1983). Passive exposure to a musical environment, such as a fetus hearing its mother sing, is a crucial way through which people learn music and become more proficient in processing music from their culture (Bigand and Poulin-Charronnat, 2006). Music from different cul- tures can be very different. For example, Western music equally divides an octave (i.e., doubling the fundamen- tal frequency) into 12 intervals, whereas Turkish music equally divides an octave into 53 intervals. Demorest and colleagues (2008) demonstrated that when adult participants without musical training from the United States and Turkey heard novel music excerpts from both Western and Turkish cultures, all of participants were significantly better at later recognizing music excerpts from their own culture than the unfamiliar culture.
Learning music through passive exposure starts in infancy. Hannon and Trehub (2005a,b) played music excerpts with rhythms of Western culture and of Balkan culture (e.g., Northern Macedonia to a group of infants from North America raised in Western music cul- ture). Some of the excerpts contained disruptions to the rhythm. The researchers observed that although 6-month-old infants can detect these disruptions in both Western and Balkan music excerpts, 12-month-old infants can no longer do that for the Balkan music. This demonstrates that infants are learning music character- istics specific to their culture at a very early age, similar to when they start learning speech sounds of their native language (Kuhl, 2010). Yet, when another group of North American infants had Balkan regional folk music played in the background at home between 6 and 12 months of age, these infants maintained their ability to process the Balkan rhythms at 12 months.
Music Aptitude
Individuals’ ability to process music varies widely. Although the amount of passive exposure may contrib- ute to this variance, the variance is largely attributable to inherent individual differences such as genetic predisposi- tion. Music aptitude is a widely used term to characterize
this intrinsic individual variability in auditory skills and an individual’s potential to achieve in music.
One of the most commonly used standardized tests to measure music aptitude is the Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (AMMA), developed by Gordon (1989). The AMMA measures music processing in various areas including acoustic features such as pitch and duration as well as structural composition such as chord progres- sion and meter. Studies have reported a relationship between music aptitude and speech processing within nonmusicians, shedding light on the shared mechanisms between music and speech processing. In one study, an adult’s neural discrimination of speech stress patterns, for example, PERfect (adj.) vs. perFECT (verb.), measured by an EEG, was found to be significantly correlated with his/her music aptitude score as measured by the rhythm subset of AMMA (Magne et al., 2016). These results led to the suggestion of a generalized rhythm processing skill that underlies both music and speech.
Early Music Training
Although intrinsic variation exists across individuals in their ability to process music and many aspects of these skills can be learned and shaped through passive exposure to music, we now turn the discussion to the active early music training that can cause additional changes in neural structures and functions, both within the domain of music processing and in domains out- side of music processing, such as speech processing and cognitive skills. When changes occur beyond music pro- cessing, researchers have named them “transfer effects” (Besson et al., 2011).
Effects of Early Music Training?
Cross-Sectional Research and
Longitudinal Research
The first type of studies that researchers conducted to examine the effect of early music training is called cross-sectional studies. Specifically, cross-sectional stud- ies compare groups of individuals with distinct music training backgrounds and examine how their brains are different. Cross-sectional studies impose highly selective rules to ensure that participants’ music training back- grounds are sufficiently different to allow any group differences to be detected. For example, it is common in studies to define adult “musicians” as people who have had more than eight years of continuous private
62 Acoustics Today • Fall 2020