, 2002; Wan and Schlaug, 2010; Zatorre, 2005). Playing music involves several sensory systems and the motor system and makes demands on a wide variety of higher-order cognitive processes; this complexity creates challenges but also provides an excellent opportunity to study how sensory-motor systems interface with cognition and how different types of training influence these interactions, all within the same general model framework.

Music requires fine-grained perception ATM inhibitor cancer and motor control that is unlike other everyday activities, thereby reducing confounding influences of other types of experience. Also, the framework of musical training allows the study of both short- and long-term training effects. Studying expert musicians exploits the extraordinary amounts of time that they devote to their instrumental practice, and hence serves as an excellent model for long-term practice on a specific audio-motor task. On the other hand, auditory and/or motor training in a musical context is relatively easy and safe to administer in a lab or clinical environment for investigation of short-term effects of training. Finally, the behavioral consequences of musical training can be readily measured using both

psychophysics and cognitive tasks, enabling the link to be made between BTK inhibitor mouse brain function and structure with behavior. In this review, we focus Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase on the literature on musical and related training studies, with emphasis on

longitudinal studies that allow conclusions about causal relationships. However, we also draw on cross-sectional studies in order to identify overlaps and differences between short- and long-term effects. In the first part of this review, we outline the literature on training effects on the auditory and sensorimotor systems and on their integration. Then, we attempt to relate musical training as a model for plasticity to other models of training and learning, focusing on some aspects of training-related plasticity that we believe yield particular insights to neuroscience, more specifically (1) how the multimodal nature of musical training might enhance plasticity, (2) how plastic effects on different time scales interact, and how this might relate to the concept of metaplasticity, (3) the role of interindividual differences for training success and plastic effects, and (4) how training-related plasticity changes over the life span. Lastly, we illustrate the potential of musical training in a clinical context. The auditory system is of course critical for music, and it is hence one of the systems that is most altered by musical training. Functional and structural changes due to musical experience take place at various stages of the auditory pathway, from the brainstem (e.g., Wong et al., 2007), to primary and surrounding auditory cortices (e.g., Bermudez et al., 2009; Schneider et al.