During music listening, humans routinely acquire the regularities of the acoustic sequences and use them to anticipate and
interpret the ongoing melody. Specifically, in line with this predictive framework, it is thought that brain responses during
such listening reflect a comparison between the bottom-up sensory responses and top-down prediction signals generated by
an internal model that embodies the music exposure and expectations of the listener. To attain a clear view of these predictive responses, previous work has eliminated the sensory inputs by inserting artificial silences (or sound omissions) that leave
behind only the corresponding predictions of the thwarted expectations. Here, we demonstrate a new alternate approach in
which we decode the predictive electroencephalography (EEG) responses to the silent intervals that are naturally interspersed
within the music. We did this as participants (experiment 1, 20 participants, 10 female; experiment 2, 21 participants, 6
female) listened or imagined Bach piano melodies. Prediction signals were quantified and assessed via a computational model
of the melodic structure of the music and were shown to exhibit the same response characteristics when measured during listening or imagining. These include an inverted polarity for both silence and imagined responses relative to listening, as well
as response magnitude modulations that precisely reflect the expectations of notes and silences in both listening and imagery
conditions. These findings therefore provide a unifying view that links results from many previous paradigms, including
omission reactions and the expectation modulation of sensory responses, all in the context of naturalistic music listening.
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The Music of Silence: Part I: Responses to Musical Imagery Encode Melodic Expectations and Acoustics
Musical imagery is the voluntary internal hearing of music in the mind without the need for physical action or external stimulation. Numerous studies have already revealed brain areas activated during imagery. However, it remains unclear to what extent imagined music responses preserve the detailed temporal dynamics of the acoustic stimulus envelope and, crucially, whether melodic expectations play any role in modulating responses to imagined music, as they prominently do during listening. These modulations are important as they reflect aspects of the human musical experience, such as its acquisition, engagement, and enjoyment. This study explored the nature of these modulations in imagined music based on EEG recordings from 21 professional musicians (6 females and 15 males). Regression analyses were conducted to demonstrate that imagined neural signals can be predicted accurately, similarly to the listening task, and were sufficiently robust to allow for accurate identification of the imagined musical piece from the EEG. In doing so, our results indicate that imagery and listening tasks elicited an overlapping but distinctive topography of neural responses to sound acoustics, which is in line with previous fMRI literature. Melodic expectation, however, evoked very similar frontal spatial activation in both conditions, suggesting that they are supported by the same underlying mechanisms. Finally, neural responses induced by imagery exhibited a specific transformation from the listening condition, which primarily included a relative delay and a polarity inversion of the response. This transformation demonstrates the top-down predictive nature of the expectation mechanisms arising during both listening and imagery.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1824198
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10309542
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The journal of neuroscience
- Volume:
- 41
- Issue:
- 35
- ISSN:
- 0270-6474
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0183-21.2021
