The Power of Listening: Auditory‐Motor Interactions in Musical Training

We trained musically naive subjects to play a short piano melody by ear in a fully monitored computerized environment and tested their potential to acquire a functional linkage between actions and sounds. Individual notes that were simply acoustic pretraining signals became "physically meaningful" posttraining. In addition, we found preliminary evidence that passive listening to a newly learned musical piece can enhance motor performance in the absence of physical practice.