Authors: Ching-I Lu and Margareth Greenwald. Psychology of Music 2015

Similarities between sight reading of musical notation and oral reading. Both are translating print to sound. Mentions Berz (1995) model for musical working memory. Says it’s close to Baddeley’s but just without empirical evidence. That’s bad I guess

For further reading> Berz, W. L. (1995). Working Memory in Music: A Theoretical Model. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, (3). 353.

Salame, P., & Baddeley, A. (1989). Effects of background music on phonological short-term memory. The Quarterly Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Section A, 41(1), 107.

Studied the effects of music on the serial recall of sequences of 9 digits presented visually. Exp 1 with 44 undergraduates compared the effects of unattended vocal or instrumental music with quiet and showed that both types of music disrupted short-term memory performance, with vocal music being more disruptive than instrumental music. Exp 2 attempted to replicate this result in more highly trained Ss (24 male 25–40 yr old Ss). Vocal music caused significantly more disruption than instrumental music, which was not significantly worse than the silent control condition. Exp 3 (24 female undergraduates) compared instrumental music with unattended speech and with noise modulated in amplitude, the degree of modulation being the same as in speech. Both the noise condition and silence proved less disruptive than instrumental music, which was in turn less disruptive than the unattended speech condition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Main takeaway: The diff between musicians and non-musicians was often significant but still small. Music exp may have a small effect on language in case of normally developed people but it has much bigger effect for dyslexics and people with aphasia.