By measuring the auditory brainstem response to two musical intervals, the major sixth (E3 and G2) and the minor seventh (E3 and F#2), we found that musicians have a more specialized sensory system for processing behaviorally relevant aspects of sound. Musicians had heightened responses to the harmonics of the upper tone (E), as well as certain combination tones (sum tones) generated by nonlinear processing in the auditory system. In music, the upper note is typically carried by the upper voice, and the enhancement of the upper tone likely reflects musicians' extensive experience attending to the upper voice. Neural phase locking to the temporal periodicity of the amplitude-modulated envelope, which underlies the perception of musical harmony, was also more precise in musicians than nonmusicians. Neural enhancements were strongly correlated with years of musical training, and our findings, therefore, underscore the role that long-term experience with music plays in shaping auditory sensory encoding.

Dance and music often co-occur as evidenced when viewing choreographed dances or singers moving while performing. This study investigated how the viewing of dance motions shapes sound perception. Previous research has shown that dance reflects the temporal structure of its accompanying music, communicating musical meter (i.e. a hierarchical organization of beats) via coordinated movement patterns that indicate where strong and weak beats occur. Experiments here investigated the effects of dance cues on meter perception, hypothesizing that dance could embody the musical meter, thereby shaping participant reaction times (RTs) to sound targets occurring at different metrical positions.In experiment 1, participants viewed a video with dance choreography indicating 4/4 meter (dance condition) or a series of color changes repeated in sequences of four to indicate 4/4 meter (picture condition). A sound track accompanied these videos and participants reacted to timbre targets at different metrical positions. Participants had the slowest RT’s at the strongest beats in the dance condition only. In experiment 2, participants viewed the choreography of the horse-riding dance from Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in order to examine how a familiar dance might affect meter perception. Moreover, participants in this experiment were divided into a group with experience dancing this choreography and a group without experience. Results again showed slower RTs to stronger metrical positions and the group with experience demonstrated a more refined perception of metrical hierarchy. Results likely stem from the temporally selective division of attention between auditory and visual domains. This study has implications for understanding: 1) the impact of splitting attention among different sensory modalities, and 2) the impact of embodiment, on perception of musical meter. Viewing dance may interfere with sound processing, particularly at critical metrical positions, but embodied familiarity with dance choreography may facilitate meter awareness. Results shed light on the processing of multimedia environments.

Acoustic periodicity is an important factor for discriminating consonant and dissonant intervals. While previous studies have found that the periodicity of musical intervals is temporally encoded by neural phase locking throughout the auditory system, how the nonlinearities of the auditory pathway influence the encoding of periodicity and how this effect is related to sensory consonance has been underexplored. By measuring human auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) to four diotically presented musical intervals with increasing degrees of dissonance, this study seeks to explicate how the subcortical auditory system transforms the neural representation of acoustic periodicity for consonant versus dissonant intervals. ABRs faithfully reflect neural activity in the brainstem synchronized to the stimulus while also capturing nonlinear aspects of auditory processing. Results show that for the most dissonant interval, which has a less periodic stimulus waveform than the most consonant interval, the aperiodicity of the stimulus is intensified in the subcortical response. The decreased periodicity of dissonant intervals is related to a larger number of nonlinearities (i.e., distortion products) in the response spectrum. Our findings suggest that the auditory system transforms the periodicity of dissonant intervals resulting in consonant and dissonant intervals becoming more distinct in the neural code than if they were to be processed by a linear auditory system.