The impact of musical experience on neural sound encoding performance

In this study, 64-channel single trial auditory brain oscillations (STABO) have been firstly analyzed by using complexity metrics to observe the effect of musical experience on brain functions. Experimental data was recorded from eyes-opened volunteers during listening the musical chords by piano. Complexity estimation methods were compared to each other for classification of groups (professional musicians and non-musicians) by using both classifiers (support vector machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB)) and statistical tests (one-way ANOVA) with respect to electrode locations. Permutation entropy (PermEn) is found to be the best metric (p ≪ 0.0001, 98.37% and 98.41% accuracies for tonal and atonal ensembles) at fronto-temporal regions which are responsible for cognitive task evaluation and perception of sound. PermEn also provides the meaningful results at the whole cortex (p ≪ 0.0001, 99.81% accuracy for both tonal and atonal ensembles) through SVM with Radial Basis kernels superior to Gaussians. Almost the similar performance is also obtained for temporal features. Although, performance improvements are observed for spectral methods with NB, the considerable better results are obtained with SVM. The results indicate that musical stimuli cause pattern variations instead of spectral variations on STABO due to relatively higher neuronal activities around auditory cortex. In conclusion, temporal regions produce response to auditory stimuli, while frontal area integrates the auditory task at the same time. As well, the parietal cortex produces neural information according to the degree of attention generated by environmental changes such as atonal stimuli. It can be clearly stated that musical experience enhances the neural encoding performance of sound tonality at mostly fronto-temporal regions.