Musicians have been found to exhibit larger subcortical responses to the pitch of a speaker than non-musicians. These larger responses may reflect enhanced pitch processing due to musical training and may explain why musicians tend to understand speech better in noisy environments than people without musical training. However, higher-level cortical responses to the pitch of a voice exist as well and are influenced by attention. We show here that, unlike the subcortical responses, the cortical activities do not differ between musicians and non-musicians. The attentional effects are not influenced by musical training. Our results suggest that, unlike the subcortical response, the cortical response to pitch is not shaped by musical training.
J. Riegel, A. Schüller, T. Reichenbach,
No evidence of musical training influencing the cortical contribution to the speech-FFR and its modulation through selective attention,
eNeuro 11:9 (2024) [bioRxiv][pdf]
The complete MEG data is available on zenodo.org.