Abstract
The act of shifting from one key to another is termed tonal modulation, which has been used to articulate emotion expressions and formal structures in Western music. The present study recorded cortical activity to examine how the auditory-evoked magnetic fields are affected by harmonizing music of rapidly changing tonalities. Participants were asked to covertly sing the pitch names of well-learned modulating melodies along with the harmonized or unharmonized melodies. In our musical stimuli, three flats were added to the key signature for every four beats. Such a rapid modulation is achieved by a chromatic inflection of the submediant tone between the third and fourth beats. Tonal modulations with such chromatic progressions are termed chromatic modulations. A major finding was that the amplitude of N1m (neuromagnetic response at approximately 110 ms after the onset of a stimulus) was significantly reduced by harmonization only when a modulation occurred. We also observed that harmonization enhanced the P2m (neuromagnetic response at approximately 200 ms after the onset of a stimulus) amplitude. The results provide evidence of the impacts of harmonization on attention efforts and pitch categorization.
Published Version
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