Professional musicians listen differently to music

Task Context Influences Brain Activation during Music Listening

“…These ratings can be made either verbally or along several dimensions (e.g., relaxation vs. arousal and/or sadness vs. happiness). The continuous rating of musical pieces is a relatively new strategy that has aided the identification of the time course of subjective experiences during music listening (Hutcherson et al, 2005; Mikutta et al, 2012, 2014; Jancke et al, 2015; Trost et al, 2015). For example, Mikutta et al (2014) instructed subjects to move a computer mouse forward when they experienced increased arousal caused by the music, independently of their affective valence.…”

“…The subjects were instructed to click on the positions of the valence and arousal lines that best represented their actual valence and arousal ratings, respectively. As with Mikutta et al (2014), these ratings were recorded for offline analysis with a sampling rate of 100 Hz. These continuous ratings have been applied in three different ways so far: (1) continuous rating of the musical piece simultaneously during neurophysiological recording [Listening and Rating (LR)] (Hutcherson et al, 2005); (2) continuous rating during a second presentation of the musical piece, without neurophysiological recording (LR without neurophysiological recording in a second separate session) (Mikutta et al, 2012, 2013, 2014; Jancke et al, 2015; Trost et al, 2015); (3) continuous rating during the first presentation of the musical piece, without neurophysiological recording (LR without neurophysiological recording in an initial separate session).…”

“…The relative disadvantage of EEG recordings is the lower spatial resolution (if the aim is to estimate the underlying cortical sources of EEG activity), although the correspondence between EEG-based estimations of intracortical sources and fMRI measurements is astonishingly high (Britz et al, 2010; Van de Ville et al, 2010). Several published studies have used EEG to measure neural responses during music listening (Petsche et al, 1993; Iwaki et al, 1997; Sarnthein et al, 1997; Bhattacharya and Petsche, 2001; Bhattacharya et al, 2001a,b; Altenmuller et al, 2002; Jaušovec and Habe, 2005; Baumgartner et al, 2006; Jausovec et al, 2006; Peterson and Thaut, 2007; Sammler et al, 2007; Schaefer et al, 2009, 2011a,b, 2013; Mikutta et al, 2012, 2014; Wu et al, 2012; Jancke et al, 2015; Jancke and Alahmadi, 2016; Rogenmoser et al, 2016). Some of these studies focused on the functional network characteristics during music listening and identified specific network features in various frequency bands.…”

“…Some of these studies focused on the functional network characteristics during music listening and identified specific network features in various frequency bands. A further set of studies focused on the frontal activation asymmetry patterns during the listening of differently valenced and arousing music (Tsang et al, 2001; Altenmuller et al, 2002; Mikutta et al, 2012, 2014). …”

The effect of background music on the cognitive performance of musicians: A pilot study

“…Musicians are more used to engaging in those cognitive exercises utilized for musical analyses and online temporal processing (North & Hargreaves, 1997), and thus background music has an increased threshold for meaningful processing in musicians compared to in non-musicians (Mikutta et al, 2014).…”