Effects of Musical Experience on Different Components of MEG Responses Elicited by Sequential Piano-Tones and Chords

Abstract

Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) studies have revealed enhancement of neural activity of the N1m response of auditory evoked fields in long-term trained musicians, reflecting neuroplastic modification of the representation of the auditory cortex. In contrast, the amplitude of the P2 response of auditory evoked potentials is modified by musical experience, with no alteration of N1. Here, we performed a comprehensive MEG study using stimulation of successive musical-instrument tones to examine how the neural activities of different MEG responses are modified in long-term experienced musicians who commenced musical lessons at ages of ϳ5 years and had continued to practice. The dipole moment of the P2m response occurring at 160 -180 ms was significantly enlarged in musicians compared with that in individuals who had not received musical lessons. The enlargement was found for the dipole moment of N1m occurring at 100 -120 ms in a restricted condition but not for the moment of P1m at 50 -60 ms. Furthermore, the dipole moment of P2m for successive stimuli, normalized by the moment for the first stimulus, was significantly larger for chord tones than single tones and was significantly larger in the musicians than controls. These results suggest that the P2m response is susceptible to be modified by musical training in a period of neural maturation, with a short refractory period of neural activity for the auditory input of composite tones. The P2m activity may be specialized to the processing of multifrequency sounds, such as musical timbre consisting of abundant harmonics.

Music training leads to the development of timbre-specific gamma band activity

“…Many of these responses, including auditory "middle latency" responses (~19-80 ms) and the longer latency N1/N1m (100 ms, N1m designating the magnetic counterpart of the electrical N1), N1c (140 ms), P2 (180 ms), and N2m (250 ms) responses, have been shown from electromagnetic studies to be enhanced in young and adult musicians compared to non-musicians (Middle latency: Schneider et al 2002;Shahin et al 2004;N1c: Shahin et al, 2003;N1m: Pantev et al 1998;N2m: Fujioka et al 2006;P2: Shahin et al, 2003P2: Shahin et al, , 2004P2: Shahin et al, & 2005P2m: Shahin et al, 2005;Kuriki et al 2006). Enhancement of the middle latency P50 response in musicians has been shown to parallel an increase of gray matter in Heschl's gyrus, suggesting an enhanced neural population in trained musicians (Schneider et al 2002(Schneider et al & 2005.…”

Selective Subcortical Enhancement of Musical Intervals in Musicians

“…Prior investigations into the neurological effects of musical experience have mainly focused on the neural plasticity of the cortex Trainor et al, 2003;Kuriki et al, 2006;Rosenkranz et al, 2007;Lappe et al, 2008), but recent studies have shown that neural plasticity also extends to the subcortical auditory system. This is evidenced by enhanced auditory brainstem response (ABR) phase locking to fundamental pitch and the harmonics of the fundamental and by earlier response latencies in subcortical responses to musical, linguistic, and emotionally valent nonspeech sounds (Musacchia et al, 2007(Musacchia et al, , 2008Wong et al, 2007;Strait et al, 2009) (for review, see Kraus et al, 2009).…”

Enhancement of Auditory-evoked Potentials in Musicians Reflects an Influence of Expertise but not Selective Attention

“…Several studies employing electroencephalography (EEG) or MEG have provided evidence that instrumental tones elicit increased responses compared to sine-wave tones in nonmusicians, too (Lutkenhoner, Seither-Preisler, & Seither, 2006;Meyer, Baumann, & Jancke, 2006;Shahin, Roberts, Pantev, Trainor, & Ross, 2005). Nevertheless, the direct contrast of musicians to nonmusicians has been shown to reveal increased amplitudes in several auditory-evoked potential (AEP) components or components of its magnetic equivalent, the auditory-evoked field (AEF) (Kuriki, Kanda, & Hirata, 2006;Shahin et al, 2005;Shahin, Bosnyak, Trainor, & Roberts, 2003, but see Lutkenhoner et al, 2006 for counterevidence). These effects mainly pertain to the AEP/AEF 1 negativity N1 and the positivity P2.…”