Brain Indices of Music Processing: “Nonmusicians” are Musical

Abstract

Abstract& Only little systematic research has examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by the cognitive processing of music. The present study investigated how music processing is influenced by a preceding musical context, affected by the task relevance of unexpected chords, and influenced by the degree and the probability of violation. Four experiments were conducted in which

The brain generates its own sentence melody: A Gestalt phenomenon in speech perception

“…However, the early syntax-related anterior negativity, although being lateralized to the left in a number of studies (Friederici, Mecklinger, & Hahne, 1996;Friederici, Pfeifer, & Hahne, 1993;Hahne & Friederici, 1999), not always demonstrates a clear left maximum but sometimes shows a bi-lateral distribution (Friederici, von Cramon, & Kotz, 1999;Kn€ o osche, Maess, & Friederici, 1999). An early anterior negativity with a right hemisphere dominance (ERAN) was found for violations of syntax-like disharmonic patterns in music (K€ o olsch, Gunter, & Friederici, 2000). Musical features such as frequency, rhythm, and intonation also appear in natural speech and are called the prosodic cues of spoken language which have been shown to be important factors of speech comprehension (Kimberly, Lindfield, Wingfield, & Goodglass, 1999) at the segmental and suprasegmental level.…”

Electric brain responses to inappropriate harmonies during listening to expressive music

“…Numerous studies investigated this field with linguistic stimuli, and recently, this field was considerably expanded by the investigation of music processing. Studies with electroencephalography (EEG) revealed that harmonically inappropriate chords presented within a sequence of chords elicit brain responses with a latency of around 180-400 ms that are maximal over the right hemisphere (Patel et al, 1998;Koelsch et al, 2000bKoelsch et al, , 2001aKoelsch et al, ,b, 2002.…”

“…In the studies from Koelsch et al (2000bKoelsch et al ( , 2001aKoelsch et al ( ,b, 2002, chord-sequences (each consisting of 5 chords) were composed in a classical style (and according to the rules of part-writing) and presented to both non-musicians (Koelsch et al, 2000b(Koelsch et al, , 2001b(Koelsch et al, , 2002 and musicians (Koelsch et al, 2001a). Harmonically inappropriate chords elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN) that was clearly visible over both hemispheres, although right preponderant, and which had a maximal amplitude around 200 ms.…”

“…Harmonically inappropriate chords elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN) that was clearly visible over both hemispheres, although right preponderant, and which had a maximal amplitude around 200 ms. The ERAN has been shown to be: (a) sensitive to the degree of violation; (b) connected to behavioral discrimination performance and probability (Koelsch et al, 2000b); (c) elicited under both attentive and pre-attentive listening conditions (Koelsch et al, 2002); (d) larger in musicians compared to non-musicians (Koelsch et al, 2001a); shown to receive its main contributions from generators located in Broca's area and its right hemisphere homologue (Koelsch et al, 2000c;Maess et al, 2001). The ERAN is interpreted as reflecting the violation of a musical sound expectancy, the musical expectancies being generated based on (implicit) knowledge about the complex regularities of (major-minor) tonal music, that is based on (implicit) knowledge about a musical syntax.…”

“…In contrast to 'real music', however, the stimuli presented in the studies from Patel et al (1998), Koelsch et al (2000bKoelsch et al ( , 2001aKoelsch et al ( ,b, 2002, and Maess et al (2001) were played by a computer with no dynamics and agogics, i.e. with no variations in tempo or loudness.…”