title: How do musical tonality and experience affect visual working memory?
abstract: The influence of music on the human brain has continued to attract increasing attention from neuroscientists and musicologists. Currently, tonal music is widely present in people's daily lives; however, atonal music has gradually become an important part of modern music. In this study, we conducted two experiments: the first one tested for differences in perception of distractibility between tonal music and atonal music. The second experiment tested how tonal music and atonal music affect visual working memory by comparing musicians and nonmusicians who were placed in contexts with background tonal music, atonal music, and silence. They were instructed to complete a delay matching memory task. The results show that musicians and nonmusicians have different evaluations of the distractibility of tonal music and atonal music, possibly indicating that long-term training may lead to a higher auditory perception threshold among musicians. For the working memory task, musicians reacted faster than nonmusicians in all background music cases, and musicians took more time to respond in the tonal background music condition than in the other conditions. Therefore, our results suggest that for a visual memory task, background tonal music may occupy more cognitive resources than atonal music or silence for musicians, leaving few resources left for the memory task. Moreover, the musicians outperformed the nonmusicians because of the higher sensitivity to background music, which also needs a further longitudinal study to be confirmed.
authors.affiliation: aKey Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology bCenter for Information in BioMedicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu cDepartment of Composition, Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Chengdu, China.
authors.forename: Hua
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: Diankun
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Gong
authors.forename: Dezhong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Yao
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009146:Music; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult