Cortical encoding of melodic expectations in human temporal cortex.

Giovanni M Di Liberto,Prachi Patel,Nima Mesgarani,Claire Pelofi,Ashesh D Mehta,Shihab Shamma,Alain De Cheveigné,Jose L Herrero,Roberta Bianco

doi:10.7554/elife.51784

Abstract

Humans engagement in music rests on underlying elements such as the listeners' cultural background and interest in music. These factors modulate how listeners anticipate musical events, a process inducing instantaneous neural responses as the music confronts these expectations. Measuring such neural correlates would represent a direct window into high-level brain processing. Here we recorded cortical signals as participants listened to Bach melodies. We assessed the relative contributions of acoustic versus melodic components of the music to the neural signal. Melodic features included information on pitch progressions and their tempo, which were extracted from a predictive model of musical structure based on Markov chains. We related the music to brain activity with temporal response functions demonstrating, for the first time, distinct cortical encoding of pitch and note-onset expectations during naturalistic music listening. This encoding was most pronounced at response latencies up to 350 ms, and in both planum temporale and Heschl's gyrus.

Highlights

Experiencing music as a listener, performer, or a composer is an active process that engages perceptual and cognitive faculties, endowing the experience with memories and emotion (Koelsch, 2014)
Neural data were recorded from twenty healthy EEG participants and three ECoG epilepsy patients as they listened to monophonic excerpts of music from Bach sonatas and partitas that were synthesized with piano sound
Violation of these expectations elicits distinct neural signatures that may underlie the emotional and intellectual engagement with music (Zatorre and Salimpoor, 2013; Cheung et al, 2019; Gold et al, 2019). We exploited such neural signatures of melodic expectations during listening to Bach monophonic pieces to demonstrate that cortical responses encode explicitly subtle changes in note predictability during naturalistic music listening

Summary

Introduction

Experiencing music as a listener, performer, or a composer is an active process that engages perceptual and cognitive faculties, endowing the experience with memories and emotion (Koelsch, 2014). Through this active auditory engagement, humans analyze and comprehend complex musical scenes by invoking the cultural norms of music, segregating sound mixtures, and marshaling expectations and anticipation (Huron, 2006). This process rests on the ‘structural knowledge’ that listeners acquire and encode through frequent exposure to music in their daily lives.

Methods

Results

Conclusion