| Summary: | Discerning a difference or change in pitch varies amongst individuals. Musicians require keen pitch discrimination to tune and play their instruments or sing in tune with others. To what extent are these abilities trainable? Is there an innate element involved that might influence the outcome of such training? This study investigates links between frequency discrimination (FD), frequency modulation discrimination (FMD), working memory capacity (WMC), and formal music education in the Western art music tradition. Previous research has shown that superior FD exists in musicians when compared to that of non-musicians and may be improved with targeted training. However, FD and FMD have yet to be compared within the same group of research subjects in a controlled experimental setting. FD and FMD have also not been considered in conjunction with non-domain specific WMC, which is known to be a feature of expertise in the visual processing domain. The present exploratory study suggested a significant difference between expert and non-expert musicians in WMC. It was also found that the FMD threshold and WMC of expert pianists (experts) was significantly better than non-expert pianists (non-experts). However, in non-musicians, there was a significant negative correlation between WMC and FMD but that the musician groups were not significant but were positive. The functional role of WMC, however, remains unclear in terms of its effect on the processing of each of these individual attributes, but it is shown to vary according to expertise.
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