Hierarchical organization of melodic sequences is encoded by cortical entrainment

Abstract

Natural speech is organized according to a hierarchical structure, with individual speech sounds combining to form abstract linguistic units, and abstract linguistic units combining to form higher-order linguistic units. Since the boundaries between these units are not always indicated by acoustic cues, they must often be computed internally. Signatures of this internal computation were reported by Ding et al. (2016), who presented isochronous sequences of mono-syllabic words that combined to form phrases that combined to form sentences, and showed that cortical responses simultaneously encode boundaries at multiple levels of the linguistic hierarchy. In the present study, we designed melodic sequences that were hierarchically organized according to Western music conventions. Specifically, isochronous sequences of “sung” nonsense syllables were constructed such that syllables combined to form triads outlining individual chords, which combined to form harmonic progressions. EEG recordings were made while participants listened to these sequences with the instruction to detect when violations in the sequence structure occurred. We show that cortical responses simultaneously encode boundaries at multiple levels of a melodic hierarchy, suggesting that the encoding of hierarchical structure is not unique to speech. No effect of musical training on cortical encoding was observed.