Regular articleMusical structure is processed in “language” areas of the brain: a possible role for Brodmann Area 47 in temporal coherence
Section snippets
Subjects
Thirteen right-handed and normal-hearing subjects participated in the experiment; age ranged from 19.4 to 23.6 years, 7 females and 6 males. Subjects were nonmusicians; that is, they had never learned singing or an instrument, and they did not have any special musical education besides what is normally given in public schools (as in Maess et al., 2001). The participants gave informed consent prior to the experiment, and the protocol was approved by the Stanford University School of Medicine
Results
We analyzed fMRI activation for the normal music versus the scrambled music conditions: the difference between these two conditions (Normal - Scrambled) should index neural processes associated with the perception of musical structure, but not with any features that the two conditions had in common with one another. Comparing music and scrambled music in fact revealed no differential activation in primary or secondary auditory cortices, serving as a validation that the two conditions were well
Discussion
Our subjects listened with focused attention to music from the standard classical repertoire, and we compared brain activations in this condition with listening to scrambled versions of those same musical pieces. The objective of presenting scrambled music was to break temporal coherence; the comparison condition consisted of “nonmusical music,” balanced for low-level factors. Previous investigations of musical structure have disrupted musical expectations by introducing unexpected chords, and
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Evan Balaban, Al Bregman, Jay Dowling, John Gabrieli, Mari Reiss Jones, Carol Krumhansl, Steve McAdams, Michael Posner, Bill Thompson, Anthony Wagner, and Robert Zatorre for helpful comments, Ben Krasnow and Anne Caclin for assistance with data acquisition, Gary Glover for technical assistance, Caroline Traube for programming the scrambler, Catherine Guastavino and Hadiya Nedd-Roderique for assistance preparing the figures, and Michael Brook for his assistance in preparing
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