The study of music training as a model for structural plasticity has evolved significantly over the past 15 years. Neuroimaging studies have identified characteristic structural brain alterations in musicians compared to non-musicians in school-age children and adults, using primarily cross-sectional designs. This perspective introduces a model for potential neurobiological pathways leading to the characteristic “musician brain” and illuminates the importance of studying the brain structure associated with musical training through a developmental lens to advance our understanding of music training-induced structural plasticity.

Music can promote auditory and language development in infancy and early childhood and may even help to support auditory and language skills in infants whose development is compromised by heritable conditions or environmental factors. We have developed early interventions focusing on music, and preliminary results suggest that these interventions promote infant's language development and auditory neural processing.

Musical training has been associated with superior performance in various executive function tasks, but only a few neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural substrates of the supposed “musician advantage” in executive functions. Here, we review neuroimaging studies on plasticity and typical maturation of executive functions, with the aim of investigating how proficient performance in executive function tasks is reflected in brain activity.

We review the impact of frequency-tuned noninvasive brain stimulation on the research field of human working memory. We report the main behavioral and neurophysiological outcomes published to date and present recent developments of the technique that aim to modulate cross-frequency coupling in polyrhythmic neural activity and to modulate cross-frequency coupling in polyrhythmic neural activity.

When playing music in an ensemble, musicians need to precisely coordinate their actions with one another, and inter-brain synchronization plays an essential role during such interactions. In this study, we simultaneously recorded electroencephalographs from the brains of four guitarists during quartet playing, demonstrating complex hyper-brain network interactions and pointing to mechanisms that support temporally coordinated joint action.

Many joint actions, from ensemble music performance to team sports, require that multiple individuals coordinate the timing of actions with one another. A major question facing cognitive neuroscience is measurement of interbrain synchrony between individuals performing joint actions. This paper describes the application of a novel method for measuring musicians’ interbrain synchrony: amplitude envelope correlations.

Neuroplasticity accompanying learning is a key mediator of stroke rehabilitation. Training in playing music in healthy populations and patients with movement disorders, requires resources within motor, sensory, cognitive, and affective systems, and coordination among these systems. We investigated effects of music-supported therapy (MST) in chronic stroke on motor, cognitive, and psychosocial functions compared to conventional physical training (GRASP).

Social motor coordination (SMC) pertains to the timing of movements during social interactions and is important for social and musical interactions. Here, we report a preliminary study exploring SMC in adult–child dyads during semi-structured social interactions. Future work may extend these approaches to social musical interactions to examine movement coordination and behavior during joint music-making activities with young children.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, after Alzheimer's disease, and the most common serious movement disorder. Gait dysfunctions in PD can be partly relieved by rhythmic auditory cueing. This consists in asking patients to walk with a rhythmic auditory stimulus such as a metronome or music. The effect on gait is visible immediately in terms of increased speed and stride length. This paper describes training programs based on music-based rhythmic cueing and their long-term benefits in PD patients.

We report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using comparable stimulus material in the voice and music domains, which include nonverbal short bursts of happiness, fear, sadness, and neutral expressions. We use a multivariate emotion-classification fMRI analysis involving cross-timbre classification as a means of comparing the neural mechanisms involved in processing emotional information in the two domains, providing evidence for a shared neural code for processing musical and vocal emotions.

The auditory system is extremely precise in processing the temporal information of perceptual events and using these cues to coordinate action. Here we use Interactive Metronome, a clinical intervention technology requiring an individual to clap her hands in time with a steady beat, as a new paradigm to investigate whether the links between literacy, auditory processing and synchronization skills, previously established in older children, are also evident in children who are learning to read.

It is hypothesized that this musical enculturation depends on two cognitive processes: statistical learning and probabilistic prediction. Here, I review research using the information dynamics of music model of probabilistic prediction based on statistical learning to suggest a single process underlying a broad range of psychological processes involved in music perception.

Previous studies have shown that monkeys share some of the human capabilities for rhythmic entrainment, such as tapping regularly at the period of isochronous stimuli. However, it is still unknown whether monkeys can predictively entrain to dynamic tempo changes. To address this question, we trained monkeys in three tapping tasks and compared their rhythmic entrainment abilities with those of humans.

We investigated whether dancing influences the emotional response to music, compared to when music is listened to in the absence of movement. We found that the state of flow was increased specifically during spontaneous dance to groovy excerpts, which may be of use to promote well-being and to address certain clinical conditions.

Musical training and bilingualism benefits executive functioning and working memory (WM); however, the brain networks supporting this advantage are not well specified. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and the n-back task to assess WM for spatial (sound location) and non-spatial (sound category) auditory information in musician monolingual (musicians), non-musician bilinguals (bilinguals), and non-musician monolinguals (controls).