Browsing by Author "Iljin, Irina"

The aim of this study was to investigate using event-related potentials (ERP) whether musical training in childhood could have an effect on neural encoding of musical chords in the brainstem. Previous studies have found that musically trained individuals differ from non-musicians in various auditory skills, for example in discrimination of sounds. Much of the previous research has been conducted by comparing cortical ERPs between musicians and non-musicians. However, extensive neural encoding of sound properties happens at the subcortical level. For example, the neural representation of pitch and timbre are thought to be extracted in the lower part of auditory pathway, more precisely in brainstem nuclei. The auditory processing in brainstem shows experience-dependent plasticity. Auditory training in the laboratory has been shown to improve neural encoding of sounds at the brainstem level, and musical training has been linked to enhanced brainstem encoding of sounds. Sixty-two children, aged 11–17 years, participated in this study. The participants consisted of 35 musically trained (Music group) and 27 non-trained children (Control group). The children in the Music group attended an elementary school which is specialized in music; at school they had both solo instrument and orchestra practice as well as music theory lessons. The control children did not have any musical hobbies and they attended a regular elementary school. The Music and the Control groups were further divided into two age groups: younger (11–13 years) and older group (15–17 years). During the electroencephalography (EEG) recording session G major triad chords were presented to the subjects through headphones while they were instructed to concentrate on a silent movie. Frequency following responses (FFRs) were then extracted from the EEG data. FFRs are ERP responses which are thought to reflect phase-locked neural activity in the brainstem nuclei. Importantly, the temporal and spectral characteristics of the eliciting sounds are preserved in the response. We found that musically trained 15–17 -year old children showed enhanced spectral amplitudes for the second harmonic of the chord compared to the control children. This indicates that the neural encoding of the second harmonic was more accurate in musically trained children than in control children. In the younger group (11–13 year-olds) the spectral amplitudes for the chord harmonics did not differ between the Music and the Control group. The results suggest that musical training in childhood might improve the neural encoding of sound harmonics. To make a conclusion about a causal relationship between musical training and heightened neural encoding of sounds, a longitudinal research design will be needed in the future.