Abstract
Numerous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that the auditory cortex tracks ongoing speech and that, in multi-speaker environments, tracking of the attended speaker is enhanced compared to the other irrelevant speakers. In contrast to speech, multi-instrument music can be appreciated by attending not only on its individual entities (i.e., segregation) but also on multiple instruments simultaneously (i.e., integration). We investigated the neural correlates of these two modes of music listening using electroencephalography (EEG) and sound envelope tracking. To this end, we presented uniquely composed music pieces played by two instruments, a bassoon and a cello, in combination with a previously validated music auditory scene analysis behavioral paradigm (Disbergen et al., 2018). Similar to results obtained through selective listening tasks for speech, relevant instruments could be reconstructed better than irrelevant ones during the segregation task. A delay-specific analysis showed higher reconstruction for the relevant instrument during a middle-latency window for both the bassoon and cello and during a late window for the bassoon. During the integration task, we did not observe significant attentional modulation when reconstructing the overall music envelope. Subsequent analyses indicated that this null result might be due to the heterogeneous strategies listeners employ during the integration task. Overall, our results suggest that subsequent to a common processing stage, top-down modulations consistently enhance the relevant instrument’s representation during an instrument segregation task, whereas such an enhancement is not observed during an instrument integration task. These findings extend previous results from speech tracking to the tracking of multi-instrument music and, furthermore, inform current theories on polyphonic music perception.
Highlights
Listening to a sound of interest in an environment with multiple competing sounds represents a common though challenging task that the auditory system solves seemingly without effort
Since the auditory system has been optimized to process sounds that are relevant for behavior, naturalistic auditory scenes with ecologically valid stimuli are valuable to gain a better understanding of auditory scene analysis (ASA)
Participants completed the experiment at high accuracy for all attention tasks: bassoon (0.875 [0.138], median [interquartile range]), cello (0.925 [0.131]) and aggregate (0.900 [0.138]; Supplementary Table 1)
Summary
Listening to a sound of interest in an environment with multiple competing sounds represents a common though challenging task that the auditory system solves seemingly without effort. This research showed that – for scenes containing two simultaneous speakers – attended speech could be better reconstructed as compared to unattended speech (Ding and Simon, 2012a,b; Mirkovic et al, 2015) at delays of approximately 100 ms or more (Power et al, 2012; O’Sullivan et al, 2015; Hausfeld et al, 2018) These results suggest an attention-mediated biasing mechanism, which enhances the neural representation of the relevant speech stream, following an initial acoustically driven analysis of the sound mixture
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