Musical Skills

This branch of the project investigates plastic changes in brain structure and associated functions that accompany the acquisition and mastery of musical skills. Numerous findings from studies of trained musicians and musical training interventions demonstrate that musical practice across skill levels induces changes in both gray and white matter, along with alterations in functional activation and connectivity patterns. While some changes map onto well-defined neural substrates like the auditory and motor cortices, others tend to be more distributed across brain networks. Research in this domain has three foci. First, we have examined plasticity in prospective professional musicians. Second, our current emphasis is on assessing singing-induced plasticity in childhood. Third, in collaboration with colleagues from the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics, we are planning to delineate the neural representation of pitch and timbre in expert musicians.

Musical training in early adulthood

We have examined prospective professional musicians enrolled in an intensive preparatory training program for university entrance exams to study music, and skilled amateur musicians, tracking behavioral and neural changes over the course of one year. Over a six-month period, prospective professionals showed decreases in gray-matter volume in the left planum polare, a core auditory processing region, accompanied by increased functional connectivity between this region and other areas implicated in music processing, while these changes were absent in amateur musicians (Wenger et al., 2021). These gray-matter changes might have reflected the selection and refinement phase of plastic change according to the EESR theory. We further have examined how musical expertise relates to functional brain organization at rest, using a task-informed network defined by an interval-recognition task. Analyses of resting-state connectivity revealed higher global efficiency of a network of brain regions supporting interval recognition  in the prospective professional musicians compared to the skilled amateurs, even in the absence of a task, with global efficiency correlating with interval-recognition performance measured both inside and outside the scanner (Papadaki et al., 2023).

Following these initial findings of training-related changes in brain structure and function, we extended our focus to include processing of musical and acoustic features during music listening. Using whole brain dynamic functional connectivity analysis, we showed that more segregated brain states occurred while listening to a baroque composition by Johann Sebastian Bach, whereas listening to an early modern piece by Anton Webern was associated with more integrated states, particularly in listeners with greater musical expertise. In addition, we found that segregation was negatively related to musical complexity, as indexed by permutation entropy, such that the music piece of higher complexity was associated with more integrated brain states. These findings provide evidence that musical structure and listener expertise jointly shape brain network organization (Papadaki et al., 2025). Furthermore, we investigated neural representations of diverse musical styles in primary auditory regions during naturalistic listening and found that neural similarity patterns clustered Western classical music separately from contemporary and culturally diverse styles. This distinction was partly driven by differences in perceived timbral fullness encoded in the superior temporal gyrus (Master thesis Theodoros Koustakas).

Musical skills in childhood

The focus of our current music-related empirical work is on music learning and development in childhood, with particular attention to activities that combine listening, movement, and coordinated sound production. Musical engagement in early life involves the interaction of auditory, motor, and sensory systems, and provides a rich context for studying how children acquire complex skills through practice and experience. Musical training is known to induce adaptive changes in neural circuits supporting auditory processing, motor control, and multisensory integration. While much is known about these effects in adult musicians, their developmental trajectories in children remain underexplored. This omission is notable, given that music-related experience-dependent plasticity tends to be more pronounced when training begins early in life. We have designed two studies, CHOROS I and CHOROS II, to track how music-related skills emerge and evolve, alongside accompanying structural and functional adaptations in the brain (Dissertation Theodoros Koustakas).By examining these processes in young learners, we seek to understand how the effects of musical training unfold in maturing brains. We expect completion of data collection in July 2026 for CHOROS I, and in early 2027 for CHOROS II.

CHOROS I is a behavioral cross-sectional study investigating how music perception and music production contribute to a latent construct of musical ability while taking into account contributing factors such as musicality of the home environment, musical sophistication of primary caregivers, and individual differences in executive functions. CHOROS II is a 6-month longitudinal intervention study that includes a series of sessions before and after an intervention period, during which behavioral tasks as well as structural and functional brain imaging are administered. Approximately 120 girls aged 6–7 years are randomly and evenly assigned to one of three groups. Two groups take part in regularly scheduled, group-based activities involving music or movement, while a third group participates in the assessment sessions only.

The goal of CHOROS II is to track how participation in structured, group-based activities involving music and movement relates to development of musical skills and the accompanying plastic changes in brain structure and associated brain function. By combining behavioral measures with neuroimaging, the study examines how experience-dependent processes unfold during a period of ongoing development, and how different forms of enrichment may be associated with learning-related changes in the brain.

Deep neural phenotyping of musical expertise

Recent work by Emily Allen and colleagues at the University of Minnesota has used MRT at high field strength to dissociate representations of pitch and spectral content (e.g., timbre) in human auditory cortex. We participate in a planned project led by Ana Clemente, Fredrik Ullén and others at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics to examine whether these representations vary in highly skilled instrumentalists as a function of the pitch and timbre properties of their main instrument.

Selected Publications

Papadaki, E., Lin, Z., Werner, A., Brandmaier, A. M., Lindenberger, U., Kühn, S., & Wenger, E. (2025). Expertise‐Dependent Brain Network Organization During Music Perception. Human Brain Mapping, 46(17), e70420. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.70420