Practice

Practicing is an activity that accounts for the highest levels of musical expertise, but one that many musicians do not typically—or at least consistently—carry out. Most people have done some kind of independent practicing (or academic studying or athletic training) in their lives and have likely heard platitudes such as “Practice makes perfect.” Such folk knowledge tends to suggest that quantity of practice is the most important factor. Unfortunately, popular handling of psychological research has largely reinforced this misconception. More careful consideration of the research, however, shows that although developing musicians certainly must make time for practice, the efficiency and deliberateness of time spent are also crucial. This chapter begins by defining “deliberate practice” as the type of practicing that optimally contributes to musical skill acquisition. Through consistent practice over time, skills that began as highly conscious and effortful progress to ultimately becoming fluently and automatically performed. Rather than striving to simply amass hours of practice time, musicians are encouraged to be more productive and efficient by strategically planning, executing, and reflecting on their practice.

The mechanism and neural substrate of musical emotions in the audio-visual modality

Previous studies on multisensory integration (MSI) of musical emotions have yielded inconsistent results. The distinct features of the music materials and different musical expertise levels of participants may account for that. This study aims to explore the neural mechanism for the audio-visual integration of musical emotions and infer the reasons for inconsistent results in previous studies by investigating the influence of the type of musical emotions and musical training experience on the mechanism. This fMRI study used a block-design experiment. Music excerpts were selected to express fear, happiness, and sadness, presented under audio only (AO) and audio-visual (AV) modality conditions. Participants were divided into two groups: one comprising musicians who had been musically trained for many years and the other non-musicians with no musical expertise. They assessed the type and intensity of musical emotion after listening to or watching excerpts. Brain regions related to MSI of emotional information and default mode network (DMN) are sensitive to sensory modality conditions and emotion-type changes. Participants in the non-musician group had more, and bilateral distribution of brain regions showed greater activation in the AV assessment stage. By contrast, the musician group had less and lateralized right-hemispheric distribution of brain regions.

Undergraduate students with musical training report less conflict in interpersonal relationships

Recent research has shown that formal musical training has a wealth of benefits in terms of cognition, mental health, social skills, and even speech perception. Of these benefits, there is strong support for a relationship between formal musical training and an improved ability to recognize emotions in speech prosody. Given this connection, interpersonal relationships stand to benefit from improved communication efficacy, which includes an improved ability to recognize emotions in speech. Interpersonal relationships rely on successful expression and interpretation of emotions in speech. If formal musical training can improve the perception of emotions in speech, it should indirectly benefit interpersonal relationship quality. The current study collected data from 197 undergraduate students about their formal musical training and interpersonal relationship quality through an online survey. The results showed that formal musical training accounted for 8% of the difference in relationship conflict but did not benefit relationship support or depth. While musical expertise does not necessarily improve relationship quality overall, it may help reduce conflict in relationships. Further research is needed, with participants who have greater musical expertise, to clarify the relationship between formal musical training and relationship conflict.

Auditory and visual short-term memory: influence of material type, contour, and musical expertise

Short-term memory has mostly been investigated with verbal or visuospatial stimuli and less so with other categories of stimuli. Moreover, the influence of sensory modality has been explored almost solely in the verbal domain. The present study compared visual and auditory short-term memory for different types of materials, aiming to understand whether sensory modality and material type can influence short-term memory performance. Furthermore, we aimed to assess if music expertise can modulate memory performance, as previous research has reported better auditory memory (and to some extent, visual memory), and better auditory contour recognition for musicians than non-musicians. To do so, we adapted the same recognition paradigm (delayed-matching to sample) across different types of stimuli. In each trial, participants (musicians and non-musicians) were presented with two sequences of events, separated by a silent delay, and had to indicate whether the two sequences were identical or different. The performance was compared for auditory and visual materials belonging to three different categories: (1) verbal (i.e., syllables); (2) nonverbal (i.e., that could not be easily denominated) with contour (based on loudness or luminance variations); and (3) nonverbal without contour (pink noise sequences or kanji letters sequences). Contour and no-contour conditions referred to whether the sequence can entail (or not) a contour (i.e., a pattern of up and down changes) based on non-pitch features. Results revealed a selective advantage of musicians for auditory no-contour stimuli and for contour stimuli (both visual and auditory), suggesting that musical expertise is associated with specific short-term memory advantages in domains close to the trained domain, also extending cross-modally when stimuli have contour information. Moreover, our results suggest a role of encoding strategies (i.e., how the material is represented mentally during the task) for short-term-memory performance.

Musical presentation of verbal information to aid memory functioning in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s dementia: A scoping review

Based on the idea that music acts as a mnemonic aid, musical (i.e. sung) presentation of information at encoding (‘music as a structural prompt’) is used in educational and therapeutic settings. However, scientific evidence for this practice in general and patient populations is still scarce. Here, we aim to determine whether musical mnemonics affect working and episodic memory performance in cognitively unimpaired participants and persons with Mild Cognitive Impairment or Alzheimer’s dementia. Furthermore, we aim to clarify the possible effect of musical expertise on the benefit of musical mnemonics. A comprehensive database search demonstrated beneficial effects of musical prompts on some aspect of memory performance in 22 of 30 studies, including eight on Alzheimer’s dementia. Seven studies found no effect, and one a deterioration. Research methods differed considerably. Musical expertise generally did not lead to additional benefits of musical encoding for cognitively unimpaired participants, but may benefit those with Alzheimer’s dementia. Focusing on clinical relevance, we provide a possible theoretical framework and discuss the implications for designing music-based memorization strategies.