It has been suggested that music training also enhances nonmusical cognitive and executive function skills. Learning to play an instrument engages three components of executive function: inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Playing a musical instrument requires musicians to continuously switch between reading notes and translating them into meaningful sounds by monitoring and adjusting fine finger movements. Furthermore, when playing in a group, musicians have to attend to new and competing streams of auditory information from other performers as well as their own playing. It is likely that mastering such skills can lead to improvements in nonmusical cognitive domains. Indeed, several studies have shown that individuals with music training outperform their musically untrained peers in tasks assessing executive function, including auditory working memory. Duration of music training has also been associated with better performance on auditory and visual forms of the Stroop tasks. Some of these findings have not been replicated, however. Structural brain differences between musicians and non musicians have also been reported outside of auditory and sensorimotor-related regions, including the inferior frontal regions and multimodal integration regions. Macro- and micro structural differences of the corpus callosum have also been noted, suggesting that music-related anatomical changes can extend to brain regions that are not primarily engaged by the immediate sensorimotor demands of music-making.

In spite of a growing interest in the benefits of music training and in the brain differences of musicians compared with non musicians, the cause of such differences has not been made clear. The differences reported in cross-sectional studies might be due to long-term regular and intensive training. Still, they might result, partly or primarily, from pre-existing biological and genetic factors that predispose an individual to develop musical aptitude if exposed to music during a sensitive period of development. Here, as part of an ongoing 5-year longitudinal study on the effects of music training on neural, cognitive, and socioemotional development of children from deprived socioeconomic backgrounds, we review the impact of music training after 2 years. We compare these children with control groups without music involvement but with the same socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Here, we focus on musical and nonmusical skills and how they correlate with the development of specific brain regions.