Journal article
Automatic processing of abstract musical tonality
Frontiers in human neuroscience, Vol.8, pp.988-988
12/09/2014
DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00988
PMCID: PMC4260496
PMID: 25538607
Abstract
Music perception builds on expectancy in harmony, melody, and rhythm. Neural responses to the violations of such expectations are observed in event-related potentials (ERPs) measured using electroencephalography. Most previous ERP studies demonstrating sensitivity to musical violations used stimuli that were temporally regular and musically structured, with less-frequent deviant events that differed from a specific expectation in some feature such as pitch, harmony, or rhythm. Here, we asked whether expectancies about Western musical scale are strong enough to elicit ERP deviance components. Specifically, we explored whether pitches inconsistent with an established scale context elicit deviant components even though equally rare pitches that fit into the established context do not, and even when their timing is unpredictable. We used Markov chains to create temporally irregular pseudo-random sequences of notes chosen from one of two diatonic scales. The Markov pitch-transition probabilities resulted in sequences that favored notes within the scale, but that lacked clear melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic structure. At the random positions, the sequence contained probe tones that were either within the established scale or were out of key. Our subjects ignored the note sequences, watching a self-selected silent movie with subtitles. Compared to the in-key probes, the out-of-key probes elicited a significantly larger P2 ERP component. Results show that random note sequences establish expectations of the “first-order” statistical property of musical key, even in listeners not actively monitoring the sequences.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Automatic processing of abstract musical tonality
- Creators
- Inyong Choi - Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology, Boston UniversityHari M Bharadwaj - Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston UniversityScott Bressler - Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology, Boston UniversityPsyche Loui - Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience and Behavior, Wesleyan UniversityKyogu Lee - Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National UniversityBarbara G Shinn-Cunningham - Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Frontiers in human neuroscience, Vol.8, pp.988-988
- DOI
- 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00988
- PMID
- 25538607
- PMCID
- PMC4260496
- NLM abbreviation
- Front Hum Neurosci
- ISSN
- 1662-5161
- eISSN
- 1662-5161
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media S.A
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 12/09/2014
- Academic Unit
- Communication Sciences and Disorders; Iowa Neuroscience Institute; Otolaryngology
- Record Identifier
- 9984002452702771
Metrics
25 Record Views