While verbal short-term memory (STM) has received considerable research interest, STM for music has been given considerably less attention. The aim of this study is to show that STM for musical stimuli is grounded in LTM, as has been shown for verbal STM. Interactions between LTM and musical STM were studied by exploring the impact of musical knowledge and musical expertise on STM performance. The role of musical knowledge was investigated by an implicit musical learning task, where participants were incidentally exposed to a sequence of tones whose succession was governed by an artificial musical grammar; after exposure, a musical STM task was presented where participants had to reproduce tone sequences of increasing length, half of the sequences being legal (obeying to the artificial musical grammar of the incidental learning task). The role of musical expertise was explored by administering the same task to two participant groups: adults with no musical training and adult musicians. For the role of newly acquired musical knowledge, the non-musician participants showed a significant advantage for reproducing legal musical sequences, showing that they had incidentally learned new musical knowledge and that this knowledge supports STM performance. The musicians did not present an incidental musical learning effect in STM recall, but overall outperformed the non-musicians for reproducing both legal and illegal tone sequences, showing an overall effect of musical expertise. This study is the first to document STM-LTM interactions in the musical domain, and this for both new and existing musical knowledge.
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