Conscious and non-conscious perception and action in musical performance

The dual-stream model of perception and action maintains the existence of two separate, but interacting, higher-order auditory systems tailored to conscious perception and non-conscious sensorimotor control. During performance, implicit knowledge of musical syntax embodied within the motor system may thus be accessed non-consciously via the dorsal stream, facilitating audiomotor transformation and making it possible to play ‘by ear’ and to improvise. In an fMRI study contrasting improvising with score-dependent musicians, significantly larger activation of the right dorsal frontoparietal network was interpreted as evidence of enhanced audiomotor transformation in improvising musicians. This notion was supported by a subsequent behavioural study confirming their superior ability to replicate and transpose aurally presented music at the keyboard. It is proposed that enhanced audiomotor transformation may be associated with the generation of a more accurate forward model in improvising musicians as a consequence of the non-conscious learning processes in which they engage. The failure of current educational methods to foster implicit, non-conscious knowledge of music in performance may be traced to the conceptual partition of explicit knowledge and the biological and physical environments in which it operates.