Navigating the auditory scene: an expert role for the hippocampus.

Over a typical career piano tuners spend tens of thousands of hours exploring a specialized acoustic environment. Tuning requires accurate perception and adjustment of beats in two-note chords that serve as a navigational device to move between points in previously learned acoustic scenes. It is a two-stage process that depends on the following: first, selective listening to beats within frequency windows, and, second, the subsequent use of those beats to navigate through a complex soundscape. The neuroanatomical substrates underlying brain specialization for such fundamental organization of sound scenes are unknown. Here, we demonstrate that professional piano tuners are significantly better than controls matched for age and musical ability on a psychophysical task simulating active listening to beats within frequency windows that is based on amplitude modulation rate discrimination. Tuners show a categorical increase in gray matter volume in the right frontal operculum and right superior temporal lobe. Tuners also show a striking enhancement of gray matter volume in the anterior hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus, and an increase in white matter volume in the posterior hippocampus as a function of years of tuning experience. The relationship with gray matter volume is sensitive to years of tuning experience and starting age but not actual age or level of musicality. Our findings support a role for a core set of regions in the hippocampus and superior temporal cortex in skilled exploration of complex sound scenes in which precise sound "templates" are encoded and consolidated into memory over time in an experience-dependent manner.

False beats in coupled piano string unisons.

The behavior of a unison pair of piano strings coupled by the soundboard bridge, when one string has localized anisotropy in the reactive part of the bridge admittance for a given partial frequency, can be investigated using a theoretical matrix description. The anisotropy can cause what in piano tuning terminology is referred to as "false beating" in a partial of the single string. A mathematical model can be used to illustrate how "mistunings" between the strings of the unison (measured when the strings are sounding in isolation from each other) may theoretically arise as a consequence of the normal practice in piano tuning, of eliminating or reducing audible beating in the unison when both strings are sounding. "False beats" in a single string partial can be "inherited" by a partial of the coupled unison's spectrum, and mistunings between the strings can eliminate or reduce the appearance of this inheritance.