Figure 3.

Neural enhancement varies according to the extent (top) and onset (bottom) of musical practice. Top: The number of years (over the last 10 years) of consistent practice is correlated with the strength of subcortical pitch encoding. Thus, the longer an individual has been practicing music, the larger the F₀ amplitude. (Adapted from Musacchia et al.¹⁴) Bottom: The precision of brain stem pitch tracking is associated with the age that musical training began. Subjects who started earlier show a higher degree of pitch tracking. [N.B.: “Perfect” pitch tracking (i.e., no deviation between the stimulus pitch trajectory and response pitch trajectory) would be plotted as a 1 along the y-axis.] (Adapted from Wong et al.¹³)