Abstract
Music is ubiquitous throughout recent human culture, and many individual's have an innate ability to appreciate and understand music. Our appreciation of music likely emerges from the brain's ability to process a series of repeated complex acoustic patterns. In order to understand these processes further, cortical responses were measured to a series of guitar notes presented with a musical pattern or without a pattern. ERP responses to individual notes were measured using a 24 electrode Bluetooth mobile EEG system (Smarting mBrainTrain) while 13 healthy non-musicians listened to structured (i.e., within musical keys and with repetition) or random sequences of guitar notes for 10 min each. We demonstrate an increased amplitude to the ERP that appears ~200 ms to notes presented within the musical sequence. This amplitude difference between random notes and patterned notes likely reflects individual's cortical sensitivity to guitar note patterns. These amplitudes were compared to ERP responses to a rare note embedded within a stream of frequent notes to determine whether the sensitivity to complex musical structure overlaps with the sensitivity to simple irregularities reflected in traditional auditory oddball experiments. Response amplitudes to the negative peak at ~175 ms are statistically correlated with the mismatch negativity (MMN) response measured to a rare note presented among a series of frequent notes (i.e., in a traditional oddball sequence), but responses to the subsequent positive peak at ~200 do not show a statistical relationship with the P300 response. Thus, the sensitivity to musical structure identified to 4 Hz note patterns appears somewhat distinct from the sensitivity to statistical regularities reflected in the traditional “auditory oddball” sequence. Overall, we suggest that this is a promising approach to examine individual's sensitivity to complex acoustic patterns, which may overlap with higher level cognitive processes, including language.
Highlights
Music is composed of a series of repeated, complex acoustic patterns
The present findings indicate that ERP responses are modulated by guitar notes presented within musical scales with repetition, suggesting that nonmusicians are sensitive to the musical features that are prominent within Western musical culture
Individuals sensitivity to musical patterns were examined by comparing ERP responses to guitar notes presented at 4 Hz within a sequence with a musical pattern or within a random sequence
Summary
Music is composed of a series of repeated, complex acoustic patterns. our appreciation of music emerges from our ability to identify and represent complex streams of sounds. An individual’s cortical responses to music may be examined by measuring event-related potentials (ERP’s) to rare sounds (e.g., notes) that differ from the musical context of surrounding sounds (e.g., by being out of key; Brattico et al, 2006; Miranda and Ullman, 2007) Using this “musical auditory oddball” approach, previous studies have demonstrated ERP response differences for changes in pitch (Brattico et al, 2001), timbre (Christmann et al, 2014), chord quality (Koelsch et al, 1999; Brattico et al, 2009; Tervaniemi et al, 2011; Virtala et al, 2014), harmony (Leino et al, 2007), or combinations of these features (Vuust et al, 2011, 2016). These ERP response differences are reflected in a more negative ERP peak at ∼100–250 ms (Koelsch, 2009; Yu et al, 2015), and an increase in the positive ERP peak that appears ∼300–600 ms after the deviant stimulus (Besson and Macar, 1987; Nan et al, 2006)
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