with bilateral activation of those areas during the perception or performance of musical
pieces and scales in our prior PET study.
The distributed pattern of activations observed in this investigation delineates some of
the neural systems subserving musical comprehension. This study may provide an early
glimpse of the functional neuroanatomy of expert musicians’ comprehension of musical
structure. These data confirm or extend prior understanding of the distributed system of
brain areas supporting pitch and melody perception, auditory mental imagery, unimanual
piano performance from a sight-read score, and bi-manual piano performance of a memo-
rized score. These findings are also consistent with and complement those reported in a con-
temporaneous neuroimaging study by Platel, Price, Baron et al.^10 in which nonmusicians
attended to either the timbre, melody, or rhythm properties of random-order, nonmusical
tone sequences. Interestingly, the latter study reported that musical timbre, not studied here,
was subserved by areas in right superior frontal, middle frontal, and precentral cortex.
The foregoing results suggest that music as a whole is represented in mechanisms widely
distributed throughout the brain. However, different parts of the brain are activated when
one pays close attention to different aspects of a piece of music. This observation is perhaps
not surprising since music is a complex, multifaceted stimulus and activity. At the same
time, the data illustrate the power of directed attention to change brain activity. The data
also suggest that the specific subareas of major areas, such as cerebellum, and frontal and
temporal cortex, perform different functions for particular subtasks of musical compre-
hension. More generally, the distributed neural system for musical comprehension revealed
here can be compared in further studies to the better-known distributed neural systems for
language tasks. Such studies can begin to identify independent and shared neural mech-
anisms for music and language and evaluate the scope of application for specific neural
mechanisms.Functional neuroanatomy of musical rhythm
The next study builds upon the findings of the preceding studies and aims to provide a
more complete account of the functional neuroanatomy of the mental representation of254 Figure 17.6 Activations in different subareas of auditory cortex as musicians sight-read a J. S. Bach chorale score
and listen for performance errors in melody, harmony, or rhythm.^46 These are group mean PET images for each
task (contrasted with passive listening control) overlaid on MRIs. PET data are z-scores displayed on a colour scale
ranging from 2.54 (yellow;p0.05) to 4.0 (red;p0.0001). (See Plate 10 in colour section.)