frontiersin | Consistent evidence suggests that pitch height may be represented in a
spatial format, having both a vertical and a horizontal representation.
The spatial representation of pitch height results into response
compatibility effects for which high pitch tones are preferentially
associated to up-right responses, and low pitch tones are preferentially
associated to down-left responses (i.e., the Spatial-Musical
Association of Response Codes (SMARC) effect), with the strength of
these associations depending on individuals’ musical skills. In this
study we investigated whether listening to tones of different pitch
affects the representation of external space, as assessed in a visual
and haptic line bisection paradigm, in musicians and non musicians. Low
and high pitch tones affected the bisection performance in musicians
differently, both when pitch was relevant and irrelevant for the task,
and in both the visual and the haptic modality. No effect of pitch
height was observed on the bisection performance of non musicians.
Moreover, our data also show that musicians present a (supramodal)
rightward bisection bias in both the visual and the haptic modality,
extending previous findings limited to the visual modality, and
consistent with the idea that intense practice with musical notation and
bimanual instrument training affects hemispheric lateralization.
