Transfer Effects

Effects within Music

Musicianship involves both listening and performance skills. Acquisition of these listening skills [Page 1146]alters how musicians perceive the sounds of music, including pitch, timbre, and timing. This correlates with the context and nature of the training experience. For example, trained musicians' neural and behavioral performance are heightened for the timbre of their personal instruments; that is, trumpeters respond to trumpet sounds better than to violin sounds, and vice versa.

Not only instrument, but also training method affects perception. Musicians with absolute pitch (AP) respond differently to pitches with and without solfège syllables, depending on whether they were trained using a fixed- or variable-do system. This suggests that differences in training affect the way that musical knowledge is stored and retrieved. That AP is an ability found among a subset of musicians suggests that training effects interact with individual differences among learners.

The musical system acquired also plays a role in perceptual learning. For example, the scale system used in a particular musical culture affects not only the particular intervals learned, but also tuning tolerances for these intervals. Although most studies on the effects of music examine formally trained musicians, listening skills are acquired by anyone enculturated to a given musical idiom, including nonperformers, and some differences between trained and untrained listeners may be differences in magnitude, rather than kind.

These effects illustrate the influence that musical training has on the processing of musical sound, and suggest routes for musical experience to transfer to other domains: To the degree that music relies on domain-general representations and information processing resources, transfer of experience will occur to and from music.

Effects of Music

With their shared basis in sound and hierarchical structure, a focus of research on music transfer effects involves language. Musicianship is associated with linguistic abilities, including early reading ability, foreign language pronunciation, and perception of speech in noise, intonation, stress, and lexical tone.

A striking case involves the ability of musicians to perceive and learn lexical tone languages better or more quickly than nonmusicians, even without prior experience. Individuals vary in preexisting ability to accurately discriminate and identify the kinds of pitch patterns crucial to lexical tone, and this ability is correlated with musical training. Success at tone language learning is a multistage process, involving the representation of acoustic information, the establishment of pitch-based categories, and encoding and retrieval of category labels from memory. Musicianship may transfer to all of these levels, as evidenced by its effects both on perceptual encoding of acoustic and temporal properties and higher cognitive functions such as auditory attention and executive function.

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