Music Processing Research Articles

Mandarin-Speaking Amusics' Online Recognition of Tone and Intonation.

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch processing. Its linguistic consequences have been examined separately for speech intonations and lexical tones. However, in a tonal language such as Chinese, the processing of intonations and lexical tones interacts with each other during online speech perception. Whether and how the musical pitch disorder might affect linguistic pitch processing during online speech perception remains unknown. We investigated this question with intonation (question vs. statement) and lexical tone (rising Tone 2 vs. falling Tone 4) identification tasks using the same set of sentences, comparing behavioral and event-related potential measurements between Mandarin-speaking amusics and matched controls. We specifically focused on the amusics without behavioral lexical tone deficits (the majority, i.e., pure amusics). Results showed that, despite relative to normal performance when tested in word lexical tone test, pure amusics demonstrated inferior recognition than controls during sentence tone and intonation identification. Compared to controls, pure amusics had larger N400 amplitudes in question stimuli during tone task and smaller P600 amplitudes in intonation task. These data indicate that musical pitch disorder affects both tone and intonation processing during sentence processing even for pure amusics, whose lexical tone processing was intact when tested with words.

Neural oscillation to music processing in children with different language backgrounds

Musical experience and tonal language experience are both associated with structural and functional changes in the brain that underlie facilitated pitch perception. We investigated whether neuronal oscillations in response to music were correlated with musical expertise and whether they reflected the language backgrounds (tonal versus nontonal, monolingual versus bilingual). We measured music processing in bilingual children (5–10 years old) from Mandarin (a tone language) households and three groups of age-matched children from non-tone language households (Bilingual Spanish-English, monolingual mainstream American English (MAE), and African American English (AAE)). Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded in an oddball paradigm with six types of music changes. We analyzed the phase locking and amplitude modulations of ongoing oscillations in the theta (4–8 Hz) alpha (8–14 Hz), beta- (14–30 Hz), and gamma- (30– 80 Hz) bands to music changes. Preliminary results suggest that musical expertise was associated with strengthened phase locking of neural oscillations to most music features. Tonal language experience was also associated with more robust phase locking. Bilingual experience alone does not show any enhancement in neural oscillation. There were no clear advantages of music processing for the bilingual experience.

Exploring auditory emotion perception in cochlear implant users: Investigating the interplay of speech processing and affective signals

Human emotions are intricately expressed through vocal sounds, encompassing affective prosody in speech and non-verbal cues such as screams and laughter. Recent evidence indicates that vocalizations take neurophysiological precedence over speech-embedded emotions and are generally easier to identify. However, Cochlear implant (CI) users still face challenges deciphering the subtle nuances in these primal signals. The implant's limited fidelity in transmitting acoustic information results in highly variable levels of emotion perception abilities among its users. Identifying the factors explaining this significant variability in abilities among CI users remains of great interest. Our recent investigations into CI users' abilities to perceive emotions and speaker sincerity have often incorporated diverse aspects of auditory proficiency, including pitch discrimination, music processing, and speech intelligibility. The combination of results from these different projects can help shed light on the intricate interplay between speech processing and emotional recognition in CI users. Surprisingly, even when presented with emotional musical stimuli, CI users' proficiency often leaned toward processes related to speech intelligibility, proposing common mechanisms underlying linguistic and affective processes in CI users that do not readily relate to musical skills or pitch sensitivity. Hence, maintaining a clinical focus on speech processing remains crucial, even when exploring affective skills in CI users.

Focal Brain Lesions Causing Acquired Amusia Map to a Common Brain Network.

Music is a universal human attribute. The study of amusia, a neurologic music processing deficit, has increasingly elaborated our view on the neural organization of the musical brain. However, lesions causing amusia occur in multiple brain locations and often also cause aphasia, leaving the distinct neural networks for amusia unclear. Here, we utilized lesion network mapping to identify these networks. A systematic literature search was carried out to identify all published case reports of lesion-induced amusia. The reproducibility and specificity of the identified amusia network were then tested in an independent prospective cohort of 97 stroke patients (46 female and 51 male) with repeated structural brain imaging, specifically assessed for both music perception and language abilities. Lesion locations in the case reports were heterogeneous but connected to common brain regions, including bilateral temporoparietal and insular cortices, precentral gyrus, and cingulum. In the prospective cohort, lesions causing amusia mapped to a common brain network, centering on the right superior temporal cortex and clearly distinct from the network causally associated with aphasia. Lesion-induced longitudinal structural effects in the amusia circuit were confirmed as reduction of both gray and white matter volume, which correlated with the severity of amusia. We demonstrate that despite the heterogeneity of lesion locations disrupting music processing, there is a common brain network that is distinct from the language network. These results provide evidence for the distinct neural substrate of music processing, differentiating music-related functions from language, providing a testable target for noninvasive brain stimulation to treat amusia.

Frontal and cerebellar contributions to pitch and rhythm processing: a TMS study.

Music represents a salient stimulus for the brain with two key features: pitch and rhythm. Few data are available on cognitive analysis of music listening in musically naïve healthy participants. Beyond auditory cortices, neuroimaging data showed the involvement of prefrontal cortex in pitch and of cerebellum in rhythm. The present study is aimed at investigating the role of prefrontal and cerebellar cortices in both pitch and rhythm processing. The performance of fifteen participants without musical expertise was investigated in a listening discrimination task. The task required to decide whether two eight-element melodic sequences were equal or different according to pitch or rhythm characteristics. Before the task, we applied a protocol of continuous theta burst transcranial magnetic stimulation interfering with the activity of the left cerebellar hemisphere (lCb), right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), or vertex (Cz-control site), in a within cross-over design. Our results showed that participants were more accurate in pitch than rhythm tasks. Importantly, the reaction times were slower following rIFG or lCb stimulations in both tasks. Notably, frontal and cerebellar stimulations did not induce any motor effect in right and left hand. The present findings point to the role of the fronto-cerebellar network in music processing with a single mechanism for both pitch and rhythm patterns.

Situating language and music research in a domain‐specific versus domain‐general framework: A review of theoretical and empirical data

AbstractWhile many theoretical proposals about the relationship between language and music processing have been proposed over the past 40 years, recent empirical advances have shed new light on this relationship. Many features are shared between language and music, inspiring research in the fields of linguistic theory, systematic musicology, and cognitive (neuro‐)science. This research has led to many and diverse findings, making comparisons difficult. In the current review, we propose a framework within which to organise past research and conduct future research, suggesting that past research has assumed either domain‐specificity or domain‐generality for language and music. Domain‐specific approaches theoretically and experimentally describe aspects of language and music processing assuming that there is shared (structure‐building) processing. Domain‐general approaches theoretically and experimentally describe how mechanisms such as cognitive control, attention or neural entrainment can explain language and music processing. Here we propose that combining elements from domain‐specific and domain‐general approaches can be beneficial for advances in theoretical and experimental work, as well as for diagnoses and interventions for atypical populations. We provide examples of past research which has implicitly merged domain‐specific and domain‐general assumptions, and suggest new experimental designs that can result from such a combination aiming to further our understanding of the human brain.

Music Signal Processing and Optimization Algorithm Based on Wavelet Neural Network Model

Music Signal Processing and Optimization Algorithm Based on Wavelet Neural Network Model

The Neuroscience of Music Processing and Music Interventions for Mental Illness

Growing research on music and language processing in recent years has simultaneously enabled us to understand its uses and promise in therapeutic settings. This review used recently published peer-reviewed literature to study the neurobiology of music processing, which includes the auditory processing hierarchy and engagement with language processes. Results showed that music has an impact on emotion systems, particularly the reward pathway and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis. Furthermore, listening to music or music therapy for the treatment of psychiatric and neurological diseases demonstrated effectiveness in improving patient outcomes. Overall, music processing is a sophisticated process with some similarities to language processing. Future randomized controlled trials are required to shed light on the neurocognitive aspect of music processing.

The influence of music on lexical decision-making in adolescents

Reading comprehension and vocabulary retention are valuable assets in modern society. Studying these processes can aid in helping individuals improve these skills. The lexical decision task is designed to test aspects of vocabulary retrieval from short-term and long-term memory by prompting the subject to differentiate between words and non-words. From this task, researchers can determine the effects of certain stimuli on linguistic processing. Numerous studies have investigated the effects of music on various cognitive capacities, like memory and vocabulary. Not much research exists, however, that directly compares the effects of background music on reading comprehension and vocabulary retention as determined by the lexical decision task. In the current study, we hypothesized that participants would show greater accuracy rates on the lexical decision task when exposed to a selected piece of classical music while completing the task, as compared to completing the task in silence. We tested this hypothesis on a group of 25 participants who completed the lexical decision task once in silence and once while listening to Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata, 1st Movement”. Their accuracy was analyzed using a two-sample t-test. The results suggest a positive association between the effects of classical background music and improved accuracy. Our results indicate that listening to certain types of music may enhance linguistic processes such as reading and writing. Further research with a larger group of participants is necessary to better understand the association between music and linguistic processing abilities.

Pattern recognition study of musical rhythm perception based on multimodal deep learning

Abstract Rhythm perception is becoming more and more important in the field of music information processing and music understanding. The study first adopts signal processing methods to extract musical features, then uses feature fusion techniques to integrate features of different modalities into a single feature vector. Based on this model, the study identifies the rhythmic activation function of music and combines it with the hidden Markov model to infer the rhythm of the music. One of the key points of the study is to perform rhythm recognition on music containing drums, to explore the recognition effect. One of the focuses of the study is to recognize the rhythm of music containing drums to explore the recognition effect.In addition, the study also analyzes the Softmax output values of the music and compares the recognition effect of different models. The results show that the rhythm recognition of music using the multimodal deep learning method performs the best in terms of the F-Measure value, the Cemgil value, the Goto value, and the P-score value, with the respective 65.65%, 66.76%, 36.75%, and 36.75%. 66.76%, 36.75%, and 75.68%.Especially in the drum music recognition, the position of each drum music is accurately recognized, proving the model’s effectiveness in this paper. The research provides a new feasible method for the recognition and understanding of music rhythms and a valuable reference for the research in this field.

Feasibility of clinical EEG for music recognition in children aged 1-12 years.

Musicality is an innate capability and the fundamental architectures necessary for music processing are present from birth. However, there is a notable gap in pediatric specific music neuroscience research and research that employs ecologically valid musical stimuli. This pragmatic feasibility study aimed to assess the utility of EEG collected via pre-existing clinical monitoring to describe the processing of familiar song as an ecologically valid stimulus, in the underrepresented pediatric population. Three comparative auditory conditions (song, speech, and noise) were utilized to assess the changes in EEG across these conditions compared to a baseline silence. Analysis of EEG data from a pilot sample of four children revealed distinct changes in the underlying frequency components of the EEG during the song condition that were not observed in either the speech or noise conditions. To extend this analysis, a uniquely hypothesis-driven, multivariate statistical analysis method (generalized eigendecomposition [GED]) was employed, however in this study we did not isolate a consistent source responsible for the observed changes in the frequency components of the EEG during the song condition. The study is limited by the small sample size but nevertheless demonstrated feasibility of collecting EEG data in the imperfect auditory environment of an acute clinical setting to describe a response to an ecologically valid stimulus in the underrepresented pediatric population. Further research with a more restrictive study design and greater participant numbers is needed to extend these preliminary findings.

Relationship between schematic and dynamic expectations of melodic patterns in music perception

Prediction is fundamental in music listening. Two types of expectations have been proposed: schematic expectations, which arise from knowledge of tonal regularities (e.g., harmony and key) acquired through long-term plasticity and learning, and dynamic expectations, which arise from short-term regularity representations (e.g., rhythmic patterns and melodic contours) extracted from ongoing musical contexts. Although both expectations are indispensable in music listening, how they interact with each other in music prediction remains unclear. The present study examined the relationship between schematic and dynamic expectations in music processing using event-related potentials (ERPs). At the ending note of the melodies, the schematic expectation was violated by presenting a note with music-syntactic irregular (i.e., outof- key note), while the dynamic expectation was violated by presenting a contour deviant based on online statistical learning of melodic patterns. Schematic and dynamic expectations were manipulated to predict the same note. ERPs were recorded for the music-syntactic irregularity and the contour deviant, which occurred independently or simultaneously. The results showed that the music-syntactic irregularity elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN), reflecting the prediction error in the schematic expectation, while the contour deviant elicited a mismatch negativity (MMN), reflecting the prediction error in the dynamic expectation. Both components occurred within a similar latency range. Moreover, the ERP amplitude was multiplicatively increased when the irregularity and deviance occurred simultaneously. These findings suggest that schematic and dynamic expectations function concurrently in an interactive manner when both expectations predict the same note.

PROFESSOR HRYHORII LEVCHENKO’S PERSONALITY PHENOMENON

The article reveals Professor Hryhorii Levchenko’s (1933-2022) personality phenomenon, who was a teacher, choirmaster, composer, researcher of national musical folklore, public figure, founder and artistic director of the Ukrainian folk choir “Kalyna” of the Poltava V. G. Korolenko National Pedagogical University (1979-2022). The author has shared her own memories of the pedagogue-artist, summarized the forty-year experience of her cooperation with H. Levchenko, and convincingly proved the unique integrity of his bright personality. The phenomenon of the artist’s personality is based on three defining values: Ukrainian folk song, mother tongue, and Ukraine. It is also characterized by his unique personal qualities. It is emphasized that the artist saw his mission in the preservation, development, and popularization of the national song culture, which he successfully implemented in his multifaceted activities: organizational, educational, upbringing, methodical, artistic, and scientific. In each of them, the professor vividly demonstrated a creative approach. The result of the implementation of the creative approach is the author’s educational manuals and musical works, arrangements, and processing of Ukrainian folk songs, original pedagogical, artistic, and managerial methods, techniques, and tools, as well as a unique system of educating the future teacher. They are waiting for further understanding, generalization, and theoretical analysis.

Piano score rearrangement into multiple difficulty levels via notation-to-notation approach

Musical score rearrangement is an emerging area in symbolic music processing, which aims to transform a musical score into a different style. This study focuses on the task of changing the playing difficulty of piano scores, addressing two challenges in musical score rearrangement. First, we address the challenge of handling musical notation on scores. While symbolic music research often relies on note-level (MIDI-equivalent) information, musical scores contain notation that cannot be adequately represented at the note level. We propose an end-to-end framework that utilizes tokenized representations of notation to directly rearrange musical scores at the notation level. We also propose the ST+ representation, which includes a novel structure and token types for better score rearrangement. Second, we address the challenge of rearranging musical scores across multiple difficulty levels. We introduce a difficulty conditioning scheme to train a single sequence model capable of handling various difficulty levels, while leveraging scores from various levels in model training. We collect commercial-quality pop piano scores at four difficulty levels and train a MEGA model (with 0.3M parameters) to rearrange between these levels. Objective evaluation shows that our method successfully rearranges piano scores into other three difficulty levels, achieving comparable difficulty to human-made scores. Additionally, our method successfully generates musical notation including articulations. Subjective evaluation (by score experts and musicians) also reveals that our generated scores generally surpass the quality of previous rule-based or note-level methods on several criteria. Our framework enables novel notation-to-notation processing of scores and can be applied to various score rearrangement tasks.

Clinical Manifestations.

Despite considerable interest in music as an index of brain function and a therapeutic modality in dementia, the neural correlates of music processing in different dementias remain poorly defined. In the frontotemporal dementia spectrum, behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) are often associated with striking changes in musical function and/or retained musical skills, suggesting frontotemporal dementia may be an instructive disease model in which to assess brain mechanisms of music processing in neurodegenerative pathologies. Here we addressed this issue using activation fMRI in patients with frontotemporal dementia. Nineteen patients (10 svPPA, nine bvFTD) and 26 healthy age-matched controls underwent 3-Tesla 'sparse' fMRI in which they listened passively to musical melodies. In a 2×2 factorial design, stimulus conditions were manipulated to probe two key dimensions of music processing: semantic memory (familiarity: familiar vs. novel melodies) and perceptual features (temporal structure: isochronous vs. anisochronous melodies). Post-scan behavioral testing assessed participants' ability to discriminate melodies under each of the two manipulated stimulus dimensions. Information about participant demographics and musical background was also collected. The healthy older control group showed separable profiles of activation in posterior superior temporal cortex for processing musical temporal structure, and in anterior temporal and inferior frontal cortices for processing musical familiarity. Compared with healthy older listeners, syndromic groups showed differential patterns of engagement of these distributed neural networks. In post-scan behavioral testing, patients with bvFTD also exhibited significantly impaired musical familiarity judgments relative to healthy controls. Frontotemporal dementia syndromes show distinct functional neuroanatomical signatures of music perception. Future work should explore fMRI of music processing as a probe of neural function in particular molecular pathologies and a candidate marker of therapeutic potential in dementia.

The naturalistic paradigm: An approach to studying individual variability in neural underpinnings of music perception.

Music listening is a dynamic process that entails complex interactions between sensory, cognitive, and emotional processes. The naturalistic paradigm provides a means to investigate these processes in an ecologically valid manner by allowing experimental settings that mimic real-life musical experiences. In this paper, we highlight the importance of the naturalistic paradigm in studying dynamic music processing and discuss how it allows for investigating both the segregation and integration of brain processes using model-based and model-free methods. We further suggest that studying individual difference-modulated music processing in this paradigm can provide insights into the mechanisms of brain plasticity, which can have implications for the development of interventions and therapies in a personalized way. Finally, despite the challenges that the naturalistic paradigm poses, we end with a discussion on future prospects of music and neuroscience research, especially with the continued development and refinement of naturalistic paradigms and the adoption of open science practices.

Effects of Genre, Emotional Response, and Perception of Music on Simple Cognitive Tasks

Investigating the impact of music on cognitive performance is incredibly complex, in part because of the potential for wide variation in the qualities of the music and the type and complexity of the cognitive task being performed. This study examined how variations in genre, familiarity, and enjoyment of background music affected the performance of 41 individuals on somatosensory simple and choice reaction tests. Although no significant trends were found in parameters of reaction time, reaction time variability, choice reaction time, and percent of correct choices on choice reaction time, trends in the data suggest that further investigation into the effects of familiarity, enjoyment, and other such emotional components of music processing on cognitive performance may be a valuable direction for more extensive testing.

Music for autism: a protocol for an international randomized crossover trial on music therapy for children with autism.

The notion of a connection between autism and music is as old as the first reported cases of autism, and music has been used as a therapeutic tool for many decades. Music therapy holds promise as an intervention for individuals with autism, harnessing their strengths in music processing to enhance communication and expression. While previous randomized controlled trials have demonstrated positive outcomes in terms of global improvement and quality of life, their reliance on psychological outcomes restricts our understanding of underlying mechanisms. This paper introduces the protocol for the Music for Autism study, a randomized crossover trial designed to investigate the effects of a 12-week music therapy intervention on a range of psychometric, neuroimaging, and biological outcomes in school-aged children with autism. The protocol builds upon previous research and aims to both replicate and expand upon findings that demonstrated improvements in social communication and functional brain connectivity following a music intervention. The primary objective of this trial is to determine whether music therapy leads to improvements in social communication and functional brain connectivity as compared to play-based therapy. In addition, secondary aims include exploring various relevant psychometric, neuroimaging, and biological outcomes. To achieve these objectives, we will enroll 80 participants aged 6-12 years in this international, assessor-blinded, crossover randomized controlled trial. Each participant will be randomly assigned to receive either music therapy or play-based therapy for a period of 12 weeks, followed by a 12-week washout period, after which they will receive the alternate intervention. Assessments will be conducted four times, before and after each intervention period. The protocol of the Music for Autism trial provides a comprehensive framework for studying the effects of music therapy on a range of multidimensional outcomes in children with autism. The findings from this trial have the potential to contribute to the development of evidence-based interventions that leverage strengths in music processing to address the complex challenges faced by individuals with autism. Clinical Trial Registration: Clinicaltrials.gov identifier NCT04936048.

What does bilingual experience do to music processing in the brain?

The relationship between language and music in the brain has constantly been a topic of discussion. Understanding how and to what extent music and language experiences influence cortical dynamics for brain functions (e.g., music and speech processing) will open a crucial door to treat a myriad of neurological conditions with an auditory or language base. Bilingual experience affects nonverbal cognition, and the neural coding of pitch is shaped by language experience in the adult population. However, it is not clear whether and how different bilingual development affects music processing differently. The purpose of this study was to determine whether different early bilingual language experience modulates cortical sensitivity to music features. Participants were exposed to varying musical phrases. The electroencephalograms (EEGs)/event-related potentials (ERPs) where recorded during changes in musical features. The ERPs were compared among bilingual English-Mandarin and bilingual English-Spanish pre-adolescents and adolescents. Preliminary results suggested that bilingual teenagers with English-Mandarin backgrounds showed larger mismatch negativity responses to some, but not all six types of music changes than the bilingual teenagers with English-Spanish backgrounds. Bilingual experience modulates music process and different bilingual experiences influence music processing differently.

Towards the origin of devotion and happiness: An acoustical and neuro-cognitive exploration of Indian spiritual music

Since the age of the Vedas, devotion has remained a key component of Indian music through centuries of changes and foreign influences. The brightest example of this is the Bhakti tradition, a pan-Indian movement (7th-15th Century CE), which integrated poetry and music in the transmission of spiritual and social goals. Devotees often report perception of emotions like devotion, happiness, awe while listening to spiritual music of their own religion and culture. This paper aims to study the acoustical and neuro-cognitive correlates of these emotions for two Indian spiritual music traditions – (a) Sikh Gurbani/ Shabad Kirtan, (b) Bangla Vaishnav Kirtan, both of which emerged from the Bhakti tradition. 5 Punjabi and 5 Bengali speaking participants listened to 3-minute long four songs from these two spiritual music traditions while EEG signals were recorded from each participant along with their emotion responses. Acoustical time series of these music clips and their corresponding EEG signals were analysed using nonlinear DFA technique. DFA Scaling Exponent values were calculated for multiple 30-second EEG segments across the total duration of each music clip to understand the perception and induction process of devotion and happiness in human brain, which is a novel step in the domain of music cognition and signal processing.