This article is part of the supplement: International Society on Brain and Behaviour: 2nd International Congress on Brain and Behaviour .

Oral presentation

Structural, functional and perceptual differences in the auditory cortex of musicians and non-musicians

Peter Schneider

Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Heidelberg

corresponding author email

from International Society on Brain and Behaviour: 2nd International Congress on Brain and Behaviour
Thessaloniki, Greece. 17–20 November 2005

Annals of General Psychiatry 2006, 5(Suppl 1):S4doi:10.1186/1744-859X-5-S1-S4

Published:	28 February 2006

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

The perceived musical pitch of harmonic complex tones, such as instrumental sounds, was observed to vary largely by up to three or four octaves, when the same sound was presented to different individuals. For example, if the 5th, 6th to the 7th harmonic of 500 Hz was played, the perceived pitch ranged between one-line B and four-line F sharp. Some subjects recognized dominantly the fundamental pitch, whereas others perceived dominantly single harmonics of the complex sounds. To quantify psychoacoustically these large perceptual differences, as earlier reported by Hermann von Helmholtz, we performed a pitch test using tone pairs of complex tones in a large sample of 306 professional musicians, 66 amateurs and 48 non-musicians. Participants were asked to find out the dominant direction of pitch shift. Overall, we observed a large bimodal distribution which enabled the classification in fundamental and spectral pitch listeners.