Brain-Music Duet: MEG signal complexity and auditory perception in musicians and nonmusicians

Music training has been suggested to lead to an enhancement in the neural activity associated with music processing. It has been proposed that brain signal complexity is a reflection of the functional capacity of that neural system. The present study tested the hypothesis that musicians have a larger repertoire of brain activity associated with musical perception then nonmusicians. We used multiscale entropy to capture the complexity of the MEG signal while musicians and nonmusicians listened to different melodies. We observed that initial melody presentation elicited higher complexity in musicians compared to nonmusicians. Brain signal complexity decreased in both groups as a function of stimulus repetition. We propose that the neural networks that underlie auditory processing have a more diverse range of functioning in musicians, as compared to nonmusicians. Repetition reduces the amount of information processing and corresponding brain signal complexity.