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1Pitch is a primary perceptual dimension of sounds and is crucial in music and speech perception. When listening 2 to melodies, most humans encode the relations between pitches into memory using an ability called relative pitch 3 (RP). A small subpopulation, almost exclusively musicians, preferentially encode pitches using absolute pitch 4 (AP): the ability to identify the pitch of a sound without an external reference. In this study, we recruited a large 5 sample of musicians with AP (AP musicians) and without AP (RP musicians). The participants performed a pitch-6 processing task with a Listening and a Labeling condition during functional magnetic resonance imaging. General 7 linear model analysis revealed that while labeling tones, AP musicians showed lower blood oxygenation level 8 dependent (BOLD) signal in the inferior frontal gyrus and the presupplementary motor area -brain regions 9 associated with working memory, language functions, and auditory imagery. At the same time, AP musicians 10 labeled tones more accurately suggesting that AP might be an example of neural efficiency. In addition, using 11 multivariate pattern analysis, we found that BOLD signal patterns in the inferior frontal gyrus and the 12 presupplementary motor area differentiated between the groups. These clusters were similar, but not identical 13 compared to the general linear model-based clusters. Therefore, information about AP and RP might be present 14 on different spatial scales. While listening to tones, AP musicians showed increased BOLD signal in the right 15 planum temporale which may reflect the matching of pitch information with internal templates and corroborates 16 the importance of the planum temporale in AP processing.

Professional musicians are a popular model for investigating experience-dependent plasticity in human large-scale brain networks. A minority of musicians possess absolute pitch, the ability to name a tone without reference. The study of absolute pitch musicians provides insights into how a very specific talent is reflected in brain networks. Previous studies of the effects of musicianship and absolute pitch on large-scale brain networks have yielded highly heterogeneous findings regarding the localization and direction of the effects. This heterogeneity was likely influenced by small samples and vastly different methodological approaches. Here, we conducted a comprehensive multimodal assessment of effects of musicianship and absolute pitch on intrinsic functional and structural connectivity using a variety of commonly used and state-of-the-art multivariate methods in the largest sample to date (n = 153 female and male human participants; 52 absolute pitch musicians, 51 nonabsolute pitch musicians, and 50 non-musicians). Our results show robust effects of musicianship in interhemispheric and intrahemispheric connectivity in both structural and functional networks. Crucially, most of the effects were replicable in both musicians with and without absolute pitch compared with non-musicians. However, we did not find evidence for an effect of absolute pitch on intrinsic functional or structural connectivity in our data: The two musician groups showed strikingly similar networks across all analyses. Our results suggest that long-term musical training is associated with robust changes in large-scale brain networks. The effects of absolute pitch on neural networks might be subtle, requiring very large samples or task-based experiments to be detected.

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