Interactions with musical long-term memory are a critical component of musical working memory

The nature and mechanisms of working memory (WM) for musical information remain poorly understood. The aim of this study is to show that musical WM strongly depends upon long-term memory (LTM) mechanisms and requires access to the long-term musical knowledge base. Two groups of participants (musicians and non-musicians) participated first in an implicit learning task during which they heard for about 30 minutes a continuous sequence of tones governed by a new musical grammar. Then, they performed an immediate serial recall task
of musical sequences of increasing length; half of the sequences were constructed in accordance to the rules of
the new grammar presented during the implicit learning task. Participants have to reproduce the sequences by humming and their performances were calculated on the basis of the deviation between their production and the stimulus needed to be reproduced. The results showed a significant advantage for the lists governed by the grammar previously learned. Overall, this study shows that performance on a musical WM task is enhanced by musical knowledge stored in LTM. This study is the first to demonstrate the dependency of musical WM on musical LTM knowledge, implying that existing models of musical WM need to be extended to account for this
WM-LTM interaction.