Beyond the musician vs. Non-musician dichotomy : Evidence for a multi-step reorganization of auditory processing with musical learning
Résumé
Recently, the way the auditory system processes local (musical intervals) and global information (melodic contour) was compared between non musicians and expert musicians in a local-global change comparison task (Susini et al., Sci. Rep., 2020). Results highlighted a clear reorganization of local-global processing with musical expertise. The present work aimed to better understand the mechanisms underlying these effects. To this end, we recruited listeners spanning a wider range of musical expertise: in addition to non musicians (N=10) and expert musicians (N=8), a group of amateur musicians was included (N=8), represented by individuals with occasional solo instrumental practice but no prior theoretical training. All participants performed the local-global change comparison task developed in our previous study (Susini et al., 2020), as well as an interleaved melody recognition task. In the latter task, participants heard on each trial a probe melody followed by an interleaved melodic sequence, and had to indicate whether the probe melody was embedded in the interleaved sequence. In the local-global task, results revealed a global advantage for non musicians and a local advantage for expert musicians, consistent with previous findings (Susini et al., 2020), while a trend towards a local advantage was observed for amateur musicians. In the interleaved melody recognition task, expert musicians outperformed both non musicians and amateur musicians, who showed comparable performance. On the one hand, amateur musicians exhibited a trend to favor local compared to global information, similar to expert musicians, but on the other hand, their performance for recognizing a probe melody embedded in a complex sequence was similar to that of non musicians. Taken together, our results reveal a multi-step perceptual reorganization of auditory information with musical learning, and suggest that, through acquired group musical practice, expert musicians would have developed a singular capacity to extract information embedded in complex temporal sequences.