Silent music reading: auditory imagery and visuotonal modality transfer in singers and non-singers

Silent music reading (SMR) induces precisely defined auditory imagery in experts. Cognitively, SMR represents a case of visuospatial-to-tonal modality transfer in the working memory. We used functional MRI to examine brain activation patterns during the retention interval (10 s) of unimodal visual (block 1, VV), unimodal tonal (block 2, TT), and cross-modal visuotonal (block 3, VT) delayed same-different sequence recognition tasks in 15 expert singers and 15 age-matched non-musicians. For the SMR/VT condition visuospatial stimuli from condition VV were re-defined as "notes" indicating tones from condition TT. No…