Brain and Music

Levitan (2006)

Chapter 3 - Behind the Curtain: music and the mind machine
    What is mind?

    Descartes' gives us dualism, today neuroscientists accept material monism
        Brain research through lesion studies, disease or accidental damage, stimulation and imaging.

    Experience of music begins in sub-cortical regions of cochlear nuclei, brain stem, cerebellum,
     then to auditory and secondary association cortexes.  [image]

    Many areas involved in musical experience

       Primary and secondary auditory cortexes - experience

        Hippocampus - memory of music

        Motor & Sensory Cortexes (& basal areas) - Foot tapping, playing and moving

        Temporal (Wernicke's area) - Listening to lyrics & making meaning

        Temporal and Frontal - Singing

Where IS music experienced?

        Dennett & Ramachandran - Where do you "see" pictures and "hear" music?

        Gestalt Illusions and grouping of perceptions

        Helmholtz, Stumpf, ... von Erenfehls, Wertheimer...

            Grouping Principles

            vs.

            Feature Extraction

                        Bottom-Up - experience (low) to higher levels of organization

                        Top-Down - Higher order influence on perception (expectations)

        Helmholtz - Unconscious Inference or logic of perception where we "fill in"
                            between stimuli into a sequence or larger whole. Gestalt.

                            Phi-phenomenon, similarity, proximity, good form,

                    Contemporary music producers attempt to manipulate these principles to create "experiences".
                        "Sounds in your head" - manipulated "voices" IN your head.

Chapter 4 - Anticipation
           

            Gives examples of anticipation in music, we expect the song to go .....there.

            Musical syntax - some 'structural' processing in both Broca's and Wernike's
                    regions as well as the complementary areas in the right hemisphere.

            fMRI has revealed the pars orbitalis and Brodmann's Areas 47 to be involved,
             likely with temporal sequencing, since also active during signing with deaf persons.

Chapter 5 - You Know my Name: Look up my number

        Constructivist theory of thought - Like Reconstructed memory - Elizabeth Loftus

        Split Brains - Specialized duties in each hemisphere - Michael Gazzaniga

        Gestalt Identity of melody even with  transposition, reversal, and tempo changes - Benjamin White

        We get Gist (like Loftus)

        But also remember specific details like Luria's "S" who suffered from hypermnesia.

        Categorization  Rosch & Wittgenstein

            Prototypes and family resemblances

            just like conceptual categories, also consider music

        Psycho-acoustics & Cognitive Psychology

        Pitch as a psychophysical phenomenon, what is absolute pitch?

        Sight singing and Earworms.

Sacks (2007)

Case Studies on Music and the brain, including the areas of:

I. [being] Haunted by Music

    1. Strike of lightning
    2. Musical Seizures
    3. Musicogenic Epilepsy
    4. Imagery & Imagination
    5. Brainworms & Catchy Tunes
    6. Musical Hallucinations

II. A Range of Musicality

    7. Sense and sensibility
    8. Amusia & Dysharmonia
    9. Absolute Pitch
    10. Cochlear Amusia
    11. Living in Stereo
    12. Musical Savants
    13. Music & Blindness
    14. Synesthesia and Music 

III. Memory, Movement and Music

    15. Music and Amnesia
    16. Aphasia and Music Therapy
    17. Accidental Davening: Diskinesia and Cantillation
    18. Music and Tourette's Syndrome
    19. Rhyme & Movement
    20. Parkinson's Disease and Music Therapy
    21. Phantom Fingers
    22. Musician's Dystonia

IV. Emotion, Identity and Music

    23. Musical Dreams
    24. Seduction and Indifference
    25. Music and Depression
    26. Music & Emotion (Harry S.)
    27. Music & Temporal Lobes
    28. Hypermusical Species: William's Syndrome
    29. Dementia and Music Therapy

Peretz & Zatorre (2009)

Chapter 6 - The Roots of Musical variation in perceptual similarity and invariance.
     McAdams & Matzkin (pp. 79-94)

Perceptual similarity underlies many psychological properties of musical materials,
     including perceptual invariance under transformation, categorization, recognition and sense of familiarity.

     E.g. How far to vary musical materials yet still perceive them as the same category.

Examined the form-bearing dimensions
    -perceptual similarity-invariance
    -musical variation  

Musical Materials have three limiting factors:

1) degree of match of volume of auditory attribute events comparing sequence

2) relations at various levels of abstraction

3)grammar of musical systems

Chapter 7 - Tonal Cognition.
        Kruwhansl & Toiviainen (p.95)

Tonality examined through experimentally quantified tonal hierarchies

Circle of fifths, both parallel & relative major / minor key pairs were examined.

Tonal distributions - key finding

Tone transitions - pitch and temporal distance between tones

Both practiced "trained" listeners on 9 - 10 chord sequence

Mapping of tonality used to visualize activation patterns over time.

 

Chapter 9 - Neurobiology of harmony perception.
        Tramo, Cariani, Delgutte & Braida (p. 127)

Vertical dimension of harmony examined through various properties of auditory system:
Fig 9.1 Fig 9.2 - Auditory system .

Examined:
1) the capacity of peripheral auditory neurons to encode temporal regularities in acoustic fine structure.

2) the differential tuning of many neurons throughout the auditory system to a narrow range of frequencies.
 

Consonant intervals - "fine timing of auditory nerve fiber responses contains strong representations of harmonically related pitches" (p.127) (E.G. Rameau's fundamental bass theory) where
"non-tonic harmony contained within it a dissonant seventh,
whether or not the seventh was articulated or audible" (Weinstein-Reiman, 2016, para. 4).

Dissonant intervals - auditory nerve activation that does not contain strong representations of constituent notes or related bass.

 

Chapter 10 - Intracerebral evoked potentials in pitch perception reveal a functional asymmetry of human auditory cortex (p. 152)

Chapter 16 - Neural specializations for tonal processing.
        Zatorre (p. 231)

Processing pitch is central to music perception and is also "neurally dissociable" (p.231)

Two Principle methods (lesion & imaging) used to show that the right primary auditory cortex is crucial for "fine-grained" representation of pitch information.

Heschl's gyrus Fig 16.1 is the primary auditory cortex

see also plate 4 for colour map of patient with surgery in this area.

Patients with damage to this area had larger thresholds for pitch discrimination vs
those with (more anterior) temporal damage no in this area. Fig 16.3

Melodic or pitch pattern processing requires higher-order cortical areas
and interactions with frontal cortex.

Ranging from basic interval differences to meanings they found activity in secondary and tertiary areas.

Imaging studies have shown increased cerebral blood flow in several motor areas, and
the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) has been shown to be important in
feedback during singing.  (found through lesion studies).

This involves tonal working memory, in order to compare melodies over time.

Eg. Zatorre et al PET study with 12 non-musicians listening to:
1) noise bursts,
2) melodies without instruction,
3) melodies and compare first two notes,
4) melodies and compare first and last notes.

Plate 5 shows these results show that subtracting passive from two-note condition also led to significant activation in the superior and inferior frontal cortex.

Functional imaging has shown spectral (tonal) and temporal parameters varied independently

Structural (lesion) studies of auditory processes show inter hemispheric differences in grey /white matter distribution.

Left side has higher degree of myelination (white matter) for faster processing than right

Left auditory cortex is suited for fast "broad-band" processing as in human speech

Right auditory cortex is suited for slower "narrow-band" tonal patterns as in music

Chapter 21 - A new approach to the cognitive neuroscience of melody.
         Patel (p. 325)

What is a melody? - "A group of notes that are in love with each other" ?

Thirteen ways of hearing a melody
1) Instrument identity - relies on timber or sound quality
2) Grouping - clusters or "phrases"
3) Beat and metre - "sound train" including rests
4) Scale structure - major (Ionian), 2 2 1 2 2 2 1 ; Minor (dorian) etc
5) Contour- overall pattern of ups and downs
6) Parallelism - motivic / thematic similarity structural and perceptual similarity
7) Intervallic implications - interval-based expectations or "implication-realization (IR)
8) Tension vs resolution - i.e., 1 2 4 & 5 serve as (ending) resting points
9) Ornamentaion - elaboration on a note (i.e. fluttering or trills)
10) Implicit harmony - "broken chords" successive notes forming a chord over time
11) Expression - playing with time for emphasis
12) Complexity - structural complexity intuited
13) Meta-relations - several of these factors combining (i.e. grouping and beat)

 www.nsi.edu/users/patel/sound_examples/pz_chapter

Chapter 22 - How many music centres are there in the brain?
Muller (p.346)

Using Jerry Fodor's modules of the mind approach have examined many areas of the brain invovled in various tasks (i.e. perception of contours)

Longitudinal experiment examining procedural (implicit) vs declarative (explicit) learning styles and their impact on the brain.

discovered that cortical activation during music processing reflects auditory "learning biography" of personal accumulated experience

Listening to music, learning to play an instrument examined through formal instruction and professional training all result in multiple, often multisensory representations of music showing distributed neuronal networks.

1970s Musical training was believed to move music experience from right temporal to left frontal -temporal cortex.

Peretz & Zatorre have suggested that this shift is actually the "way of listening to music" whereby musicians engage in "inner speech" Fig 22.1

Lesion studies have also shown that there are modules present (i.e. time-left temporal; pitch-right temporal; pitch structures - right supratemporal)

Rhythm involves processing serial durations while meter involves a complex acoustical gestalt relying also intensity (emphasis).

Individual data, however, show most variability across subjects.

Lesion studies show great heterogeneity of patterns of impairment

Left hemisphere stroke shows impairment of rhythm and metre, interval or contour, may be anterior or posterior, and may include posterior parietal lobs as well as frontal lobes.

Brain, Music and Emotion