Music acquisition: effects of enculturation and formal training on development

Musical structure is complex, consisting of a small set of elements that combine to form hierarchical levels of pitch and temporal structure according to grammatical rules. As with language, different systems use different elements and rules for combination. Drawing on recent findings, we propose that music acquisition begins with basic features, such as peripheral frequency-coding mechanisms and multisensory timing connections, and proceeds through enculturation, whereby everyday exposure to a particular music system creates, in a systematic order of acquisition, culture-specific brain structures and representations. Finally, we propose that formal musical training invokes domain-specific processes that affect salience of musical input and the amount of cortical tissue devoted to its processing, as well as domain-general processes of attention and executive functioning.

Introduction

Interest in musical origins has increased dramatically in the past decade 1, 2, 3, 4. Fundamental to this topic is the question of how musical experiences affect development. It is clear that some aspects of musical competence, such as the ability to read music, require formal music lessons. However, just as children come to understand their spoken language, most individuals acquire basic musical competence through everyday exposure to music during development 5, 6, 7. Such implicit musical knowledge enables listeners, regardless of formal music training, to tap and dance to music, detect wrong notes, remember and reproduce familiar tunes and rhythms, and feel the emotions expressed in music. Recent work also suggests that explicit musical instruction, in addition to enhancing music-specific knowledge, substantially affects development of basic behaviors and neural processes in a range of domains and modalities. A key goal of current research in the field is to understand the effects of experience on domain-specific and domain-general developmental outcomes (Figure 1).

Here we outline two types of experience that fundamentally shape development: (1) ‘enculturation processes’, in which basic auditory capacities are modified by everyday experience listening to the music of a particular culture, and (2) ‘formal musical experience’, through which perception and production skills are trained to a high level, and musical knowledge becomes explicit.