Superior formation of cortical memory traces for melodic patterns in musicians

The human central auditory system has a remarkable ability to establish mem ory traces for invariant features in the acoustic environment despite conti nual acoustic variations in the sounds heard. By recording the memory-relat ed mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory electric and magneti c brain responses as well as behavioral performance, we investigated how su bjects learn to discriminate changes in a melodic pattern presented at seve ral frequency levels. In addition, we explored whether musical expertise fa cilitates this learning. Our data show that especially musicians who perfor m music primarily without a score learn easily to detect contour changes in a melodic pattern presented at variable frequency levels. After learning, their auditory cortex detects these changes even when their attention is di rected away from the sounds. The present results thus show that, after perc eptual learning during attentive listening has taken place, changes in a hi ghly complex auditory pattern can be detected automatically by the human au ditory cortex and, further, that this process is facilitated by musical exp ertise.