Learning to play an instrument requires the progressive tuning almost all of a student's senses. He trains his ears to hear consonance and dissonance and eyes to read sheet music or read other musicians' body language, for example. The protracted training that is required to become a musician has been shown to bestow perceptual advantages and shape the anatomy and function of the cortex. What is not known is whether musical training shapes subcortical responses and the extent to which putative encoding specializations extend to non-musical or multimodal stimuli. To this end, we explored visual influence on human brainstem responses, how the musician's brainstem differed from non-musicians, and how these differences related to cortical encoding mechanisms. We found that musicians have specialized brainstem mechanisms for encoding pitch periodicity of speech sounds and that the relationship between low- and high-level function is more strongly related in this group, compared to non-musicians. These effects were seen when subjects were listening to music or speech sounds alone and when they viewed concomitant video tokens simultaneously. These data indicate that representation of sight and sound in the human brainstem, which is the neural gateway to higher level function, can be shaped my musical training and that speech and music encoding at this level share neural resources.

Last modified

• 09/08/2018

Creator

• Gabriella Musacchia

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2973V

Subject

• Communication Sciences and Disorders - Speech and Language Pathology and Learning Disabilities

Keyword

• EEG
• Plasticity
• Language
• Speech
• Brainstem
• Music

Date created

• 2008-05-09

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright