http://www.nature.com/nsu/010816/010816-4.html

Left in music

Musicians' brains may use language modules listening to music.

13 August 2001

ERICA KLARREICH

At a performance of Beethoven's Fifth, you could tell which audience
members were musicians - if you happened to be carrying a brain scanner.

Professional musicians use their left brain more than other people when
listening to music, a magnetic-resonance study suggests1. Musicians, unlike
others, may process music much as a language, the result hints.

When played a recording of Bach's Italian Concerto, all the study's 28
subjects showed activity in the planum temporale, part of the temporal lobe
above the ear canal that is thought to be responsible for many auditory
tasks. Non-musicians' brain activity was concentrated in the right side of
the planum temporale, but in musicians the left side dominated.

This left-hand brain activity was most pronounced in people who had started
musical training at an early age, as well as in those with absolute or
'perfect' pitch (the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without
hearing it in the context of other notes).

The age correlation suggests that musical traits such as absolute pitch are
the result of childhood training, not genetic predisposition, says Takashi
Ohnishi, of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry in Tokyo, who
led the study.

"Musical experience during childhood may influence the structural
development of the planum temporale," he says. "Our data suggest that
absolute pitch should be acquired through experience rather than innate
ability."

"We've been discussing things along these lines for a while, but we never
believed there was such a clear outcome as there is here," says Thomas
Elbert, the neuroscientist at the University of Konstanz in Germany who was
in the news last week for his study of chess grandmasters.

Take note

The left planum temporale is thought to control language processing.
Although absolute pitch has a verbal element - the connection of a name
with a musical tone - scientists cannot explain why musicians should rely
so heavily on a language-processing region of the brain.

"The most simple explanation is that we learn to label tones by names,"
says Gottfried Schlaug, a neurologist who studies perfect pitch at Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. The truth may lie deeper, he
suggests. "There may be underlying principles of analysis of language and
music that involve the same brain structures."

Musicians seem to process music as writers do language, Elbert agrees.
"When a composer stops creating music, musicians say that he 'has nothing
more to say'," he says. "They use language terminology daily to describe
their way of music processing."

Whether musicians actually perceive music differently is a question that
Ohnishi hopes to probe in further studies. "It is possible that musicians
develop a different way of listening to music, which is inherently more
analytical," he says.
 
 

References

1.Ohnishi, T. et al.Functional anatomy of musical perception in musicians.
Cerebral Cortex, 11, 754 - 760, (2001).