skip to main content

Explore Research Products in the NSF-PAR

Title: The Music of Silence: Part II: Music Listening Induces Imagery Responses
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1824198
NSF-PAR ID:
10309543
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
The journal of neuroscience
Volume:
41
Issue:
35
ISSN:
0270-6474
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ( , The journal of neuroscience)
    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. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ( , Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts)
    Human imagination is generative and creative yet deeply rooted in culture and familiarity. Recent studies have quantified the effects of culture on stories that are imagined during music listening, but the music used in previous work was always drawn from a tradition familiar to participants from at least one of the cultures. Here we report the first study of imagined stories to music written in a musical system that is novel to participants from each culture, thus allowing for a direct comparison of narratives prompted by the same set of excerpts that is comparably unfamiliar to both groups. Music composed in the Bohlen–Pierce scale was presented to participants from two geographically defined cultures: Boston, United States and Beijing, China. We also examined how individual differences, such as in musicality and sensitivity to musical reward, might affect narrative engagement and semantic content of the imagined stories as measured by tools from natural language processing. Results showed that semantic spaces of music-evoked imaginings differed between Boston and Beijing cohorts. While both cultures were similarly engaged by the story response task, differences emerged in the semantic content of the imagined stories. Boston participants who reported being more absorbed by music wrote more unconventional stories, whereas Beijing participants who reported more emotional responses to music wrote more conventional stories. These results reveal the roles of culture and individual differences in modes of narrative engagement and imagination during music listening. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ( , eLife)
    Humans engagement in music rests on underlying elements such as the listeners’ cultural background and interest in music. These factors modulate how listeners anticipate musical events, a process inducing instantaneous neural responses as the music confronts these expectations. Measuring such neural correlates would represent a direct window into high-level brain processing. Here we recorded cortical signals as participants listened to Bach melodies. We assessed the relative contributions of acoustic versus melodic components of the music to the neural signal. Melodic features included information on pitch progressions and their tempo, which were extracted from a predictive model of musical structure based on Markov chains. We related the music to brain activity with temporal response functions demonstrating, for the first time, distinct cortical encoding of pitch and note-onset expectations during naturalistic music listening. This encoding was most pronounced at response latencies up to 350 ms, and in both planum temporale and Heschl’s gyrus. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ( , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
    The scientific literature sometimes considers music an abstract stimulus, devoid of explicit meaning, and at other times considers it a universal language. Here, individuals in three geographically distinct locations spanning two cultures performed a highly unconstrained task: they provided free-response descriptions of stories they imagined while listening to instrumental music. Tools from natural language processing revealed that listeners provide highly similar stories to the same musical excerpts when they share an underlying culture, but when they do not, the generated stories show limited overlap. These results paint a more complex picture of music’s power: music can generate remarkably similar stories in listeners’ minds, but the degree to which these imagined narratives are shared depends on the degree to which culture is shared across listeners. Thus, music is neither an abstract stimulus nor a universal language but has semantic affordances shaped by culture, requiring more sustained attention from psychology. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ( , Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)
    Abstract

    Music frequently elicits intense emotional responses, a phenomenon that has been scrutinized from multiple disciplines that span the sciences and arts. While most people enjoy music and find it rewarding, there is substantial individual variability in the experience and degree of music‐induced reward. Here, we review current work on the neural substrates of hedonic responses to music. In particular, we focus the present review on specific musical anhedonia, a selective lack of pleasure from music. Based on evidence from neuroimaging, neuropsychology, and brain stimulation studies, we derive a neuroanatomical model of the experience of pleasure during music listening. Our model posits that hedonic responses to music are the result of connectivity between structures involved in auditory perception as a predictive process, and those involved in the brain's dopaminergic reward system. We conclude with open questions and implications of this model for future research on why humans appreciate music.

     
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email