Hemispheric dominance for melody recognition in musicians and non-musicians

In two experiments, one with instrumental and one with synthesized tunes, 20 musicians and 20 non-musicians were requested to identify popular melodies presented dichotically. When the tempo of the melodies is fast enough to render their identification difficult, a right-ear advantage appears in the former group and a left-ear advantage in the latter, a pattern observed with both types of stimuli. It is suggested that these lateralization effects depend not only on the level of competence of the subjects, as hypothesized by Bever and Chiarello (Science, Vol. 185, pp. 537-539, 1974), but also on the musical features of the stimuli.