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Music training, in all its forms, is known to have an impact on behavior both in childhood and even in aging. In the delicate life period of transition from childhood to adulthood, music training might have a special role for behavioral and cognitive maturation. Among the several kinds of music training programs implemented in the educational communities, we focused on instrumental training incorporated in the public middle school curriculum in Italy that includes both individual, group and collective (orchestral) lessons several times a week. At three middle schools, we tested 285 preadolescent children (aged 10–14 years) with a test and questionnaire battery including adaptive tests for visuo-spatial working memory skills (with the Jack and Jill test), fluid intelligence (with a matrix reasoning test) and music-related perceptual and memory abilities (with listening tests). Of these children, 163 belonged to a music curriculum within the school and 122 to a standard curriculum. Significant differences between students of the music and standard curricula were found in both perceptual and cognitive domains, even when controlling for pre-existing individual differences in musical sophistication. The music children attending the third and last grade of middle school had better performance and showed the largest advantage compared to the control group on both audiovisual working memory and fluid intelligence. Furthermore, some gender differences were found for several tests and across groups in favor of females. The present results indicate that learning to play a musical instrument as part of the middle school curriculum represents a resource for preadolescent education. Even though the current evidence is not sufficient to establish the causality of the found effects, it can still guide future research evaluation with longitudinal data.

Current models of aesthetic experience of music (AEM) have emerged in the recent years capitalizing on evidence from psychology and neuroscience research, thus modeling mainly cognitive and information processes in the brain. However, a large part of the empirical research on which these models are based is related to Western tonal music, while another style of Western music, namely, contemporary classical music (CCM), has been almost neglected. CCM is often dissonant and lacks a tonal hierarchical structure, as, for example, in serial musical pieces. The current study qualitatively explored aesthetic dimensions of a CCM experience by contrasting it to classic–romantic music (CM). To this end, 16 semi-structured interviews with experts of both CCM (n = 8) and CM (n = 8) were conducted. The interview guide consisted of questions relating to physiological, affective, and cognitive dimensions of music listening. We applied qualitative content analysis on the textual material and compared the emerging main and sub-themes between the groups. Our findings show that especially the categories of expectations, physiological and emotional responses, pleasurable aspects, and, lastly, existential relevance revealed striking differences which allow us to conclude that CM and CCM afford distinguishable types of AEM in listeners.

The present study was aimed at finding neural correlates of aesthetic versus descriptive listening of the same musical cadences. Results showed that aesthetic listening generated greater right frontocentral negativities than did descriptive listening, indicating distinct cortical mechanisms for aesthetic versus descriptive processing of music.

Patient I.R., who had bilateral lesions in the auditory cortex but intact hearing, did not distinguish dissonant from consonant musical excerpts in behavioral testing. We additionally found that the electrical brain responses did not differentiate musical intervals in terms of their dissonance/consonance, consistent with the idea that this phenomenon depends on the integrity of cortical functions.

We investigated the brain mechanisms enabling one automatically discriminate phoneme category irrespective of the large inter-speaker variability in the acoustic features of the voices. For this purpose, subjects were presented with 450 different speech stimuli, each uttered by a different speaker, belonging to three vowel categories, while a 306-channel magnetoencephalogram (MEG) was obtained to record the magnetic counterpart of the mismatch negativity (MMNm), elicited only when sensory memory traces for repetitive sounds are formed in the auditory cortex. Despite this wide acoustic variation, category changes elicited prominent MMNm responses, which were considerably stronger in the left than in the right hemisphere in the right-handed subjects. These results implicate the presence of long-term memory traces for vowels, which can recognize the vowel-specific invariant code enabling correct vowel percept even in the presence of realistic acoustic variation.

Behavioral evidence indicates that musical context facilitates pitch discrimination. In the present study, we sought to determine whether pitch context and its familiarity might affect brain responses to pitch change even at the preattentive level. Ten musicians and 10 nonmusicians, while concentrating on reading a book, were presented with sound stimuli that had an infrequent (p = 15 %) pitch shift of 144 Hz. In the familiar condition, the infrequent third-position deviant changed the mode (major vs. minor) of the five-tone pattern. In the unfamiliar condition, patterns were formed from five arithmetically determined tone frequencies, the deviant not causing any change of mode. The no-context condition included only third-position tones. All deviants elicited the change-specific mismatch negativity component of the event-related potentials in both groups of subjects. In both musicians and nonmusicians, pitch change in the familiar condition evoked larger mismatch negativity amplitude than the change in the unfamiliar condition and, correspondingly, larger mismatch negativity in the unfamiliar condition than in the no-context condition. This suggests that preattentive pitch-change processing is generally enhanced in a familiar context. Moreover, the latency of the mismatch negativity was shorter for musicians than for nonmusicians in both the familiar and unfamiliar conditions, whereas no difference between groups was observed in the no-context condition. This finding indicates that, in response to sequential structured sound events, the auditory system reacts faster in musicians than in nonmusicians.Received December 8, 1999, accepted July 14, 2001.