Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Musical Training 25
Deliberate practise is a highly structured activity with the explicit goal to improve ones
own performance. This activity requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable, but individuals
might be motivated by its instrumental value in improving performance. It involves
careful monitoring and problem solving to attain the desired improvements.
Repeated exposure to critical aspects of the task should allow for an incrementally improvement
of the own performance in response to feedback (Gruson, 1988; Miklaszewski,
1989).
Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) proposed a framework to account for expert
performance. Their central thesis is that expert performance is related to an extended
process of skill acquisition, mediated by large, but not excessive daily amounts
of deliberate practice (to guarantee for optimal concentration and effectiveness). They
observed a highly predictive relationship between the skill level of different groups of
musicians (excellent musicians with potential for international careers, good musicians,
and music teachers) and the average number of hours of accumulated practise. Moreover,
they did show that excellent and good musicians did not differ in terms of their
actual amount of practising, but in the accumulated amount of practising over the entire
developmental period. However, in the early stages of acquiring musical expertise (i.e.,
in 7 to 9 year old children), conceptions based on the amount of practice may be inadequate
to understand the process of instrumental development. Instead, their (metacognitive)
strategies (as, e.g., the amount of self-correction when rehearsing, or beginning
with repertoire to be practised before turning to pieces they enjoy to play) were a
more powerful predictor than their accumulated practice (McPherson, 2005): Better
players had more sophisticated learning strategies (very early in their development), and
the general understanding that their performance was tied to the quality of their effort.
Musical skills
In general, experts attain particular skills that circumvent basic limits on working memory
capacity and sequential processing. Experts do not only have more, but also better
organized knowledge, which enables them to retrieve solution plans as part of their
comprehension of problems. This is a result of acquiring – during many years of experience
– vast amounts of knowledge and the ability to perform pattern-based retrieval.
Musicians have sophisticated skills for basic aspects of auditory processing, e.g., they
effortlessly detected tempo manipulations (Ellis, 1991), changes in the tuning of intervals
(Elliot, Platt, & Racine, 1987), or in instrumental timbre (Chartrand & Belin, 2006;
Crummer, Walton, Wayman, Hantz, & Frisina, 1994). In addition, employing their
knowledge of musical structure, musicians are superior [1] in their processing of consonant
vs. dissonant target chords following harmonic priming (Bigand et al., 1999), [2] in