Auditory Profiles of Classical, Jazz, and Rock Musicians: Genre-Specific Sensitivity to Musical Sound Features

Abstract

When compared with individuals without explicit training in music, adult musicians have facilitated neural functions in several modalities. They also display structural changes in various brain areas, these changes corresponding to the intensity and duration of their musical training. Previous studies have focused on investigating musicians with training in Western classical music. However, musicians involved in different musical genres may display highly differentiated auditory profiles according to the demands set by their genre, i.e., varying importance of different musical sound features. This hypothesis was tested in a novel melody paradigm including deviants in tuning, timbre, rhythm, melody transpositions, and melody contour. Using this paradigm while the participants were watching a silent video and instructed to ignore the sounds, we compared classical, jazz, and rock musicians' and non-musicians' accuracy of neural encoding of the melody. In all groups of participants, all deviants elicited an MMN response, which is a cortical index of deviance discrimination. The strength of the MMN and the subsequent attentional P3a responses reflected the importance of various sound features in each music genre: these automatic brain responses were selectively enhanced to deviants in tuning (classical musicians), timing (classical and jazz musicians), transposition (jazz musicians), and melody contour (jazz and rock musicians). Taken together, these results indicate that musicians with different training history have highly specialized cortical reactivity to sounds which violate the neural template for melody content.

Distortion and Rock Guitar Harmony

“…215-218) found metal musicians perceiving musical structures differently from Western music theory, it appears that rock fans perceive distorted tones differently from people who do not like this genre (Virtala & Tervaniemi, 2017, p. 398). This result accords with studies that demonstrated that characteristic musical features of certain genres are processed differently by musicians specializing in other genres (Tervaniemi, Janhunen, Kruck, Putkinen & Huotilainen, 2015;Vuust, Brattico, Seppänen, Näätänen & Tervaniemi, 2012). However, the triangulation results showed that while rock fans were less affected by the increased sensory unpleasantness of distortion than participants who do not like this genre, they still differed considerably from electric guitar players.…”

Musical interaction is influenced by underlying predictive models and musical expertise

“…EEG studies have shown differences in sensitivity and amplitudes in MMN responses between musicians belonging to different genres 53,56 . On a behavioural level, drummers have been shown to be better at certain rhythmical tasks, yet the extent of these differences between types of musicians are not yet fully understood [57][58][59] .…”

Distortion and Western Music Chord Processing

“…Furthermore, contour and interval changes in a melody elicit larger MMNm responses (magnetic counterparts of the MMN recorded with magnetoencephalogram, MEG) in musicians than nonmusicians (Fujioka, Trainor, Ross, Kakigi, & Pantev, 2004). For the P3a response, plasticity induced by music expertise has been demonstrated for violations of Western music harmony that elicited enhanced P3a responses in folk musicians compared to nonmusicians (Brattico, Tupala, Glerean, & Tervaniemi, 2013; see also Tervaniemi, Janhunen, Kruck, Putkinen, & Huotilainen, 2015). Similarly, changes in interval width between consecutive notes in a melody elicited earlier and larger P3a responses (and later P3b responses) in musicians than nonmusicians (Trainor, Desjardins, & Rockel, 1999).…”