Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923 ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Issue: The Neurosciences and Music IV: Learning and Memory Practiced musical style shapes auditory skills Peter Vuust, 1,2, ∗ Elvira Brattico, 3,4, ∗ Miia Sepp ¨ anen, 3,4 Risto N ¨ a¨ at¨ anen, 1,3,5 and Mari Tervaniemi 3,4 1 Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University, Denmark. 2 The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus, Denmark. 3 Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Institute of Behavioral Sciences, Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. 4 Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research, University of Jyv¨ askyl ¨ a, Finland. 5 Department of Psychology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Address for correspondence: Peter Vuust, Centre of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University Hospital, Norrebrogade 44, Building 14A 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. pv@pet.auh.dk Musicians’ processing of sounds depends highly on instrument, performance practice, and level of expertise. Here, we measured the mismatch negativity (MMN), a preattentive brain response, to six types of musical feature change in musicians playing three distinct styles of music (classical, jazz, and rock/pop) and in nonmusicians using a novel, fast, and musical sounding multifeature MMN paradigm. We found MMN to all six deviants, showing that MMN paradigms can be adapted to resemble a musical context. Furthermore, we found that jazz musicians had larger MMN amplitude than all other experimental groups across all sound features, indicating greater overall sensitivity to auditory outliers. Furthermore, we observed a tendency toward shorter latency of the MMN to all feature changes in jazz musicians compared to band musicians. These findings indicate that the characteristics of the style of music played by musicians influence their perceptual skills and the brain processing of sound features embedded in music. Keywords: mismatch negativity (MMN); EEG; musicians; multifeature MMN paradigm; musical style; learning Introduction Learning to play music at a professional level re- quires years of targeted training and dedication to music. The study of how musicians’ brains evolve through daily training has recently emerged as an effective way of gaining insight into changes of the human brain during development and training. 1–4 Mismatch negativity (MMN) studies have consis- tently revealed neural differences in early sound pro- cessing between people with different musical back- grounds. The stimuli used in these studies, however, have often been far from musical sounding, hours long, and very repetitive, making the experiments less ecologically valid. Furthermore, MMN studies and studies of musical abilities in cognitive neu- roscience, in general, have mainly been confined to cross-sectional studies of musicians versus non- ∗ Both the authors contributed equally. musicians (NMs), treating musicians as a unified group. 5 This paper poses the questions: Can the MMN paradigms be adapted to resemble a musical context while keeping the experimental duration contained, and will they reveal differences in sound-related brain activity between different types of musicians? The MMN, as measured with electroencephalog- raphy (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) with subjects’ attention diverted from the stimuli, is a preattentive brain response mainly originating from the auditory cortices at around 100–200 ms after a change in sound features, such as pitch, tim- bre, and intensity. 6–8 Its amplitude and latency de- pends on change magnitude such that larger feature changes yield larger and faster MMNs. 9 The MMN is considered a candidate index of auditory capabil- ities. This has been substantiated by studies show- ing that the amplitude and latency of the MMN depend highly on instrument, practice strategies, and on the level of expertise. Musicians who need to intone while playing their instrument, such as doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06409.x Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1252 (2012) 139–146 c  2012 New York Academy of Sciences. 139