A comparison of contour and interval processing in musicians and nonmusicians using event-related potentials

Musicians and nonmusicians detected infrequent changes to the last note of five-note melodies that either altered the contour (up/down pattern) or the intervals (pitch distance between notes). Robust frontal P3as, reflecting automatic capture of attention, as well as P3bs, reflecting analytic stimulus evaluation, were generated in both contour and interval tasks. These components did not differ across groups for contour, but were smaller and …