The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

within the linguistic context when they only listened to the music. Conversely, P600 ampli-
tude was significantly reduced when musicians focused attention on language, so that they
did not hear that the final word was sung out of tune. Taken together these results again
provide strong arguments in favour of the independence of lyrics and tunes. There is some
limit to such processing independence, however. Results in the double incongruity condi-
tion showed that the presence of one type of incongruity influenced the processing of
the other type. When words were both semantically incongruous and sung out of tune,
musicians could not help but hear the musical incongruity, even if they were asked to focus
their attention on language.

Syntax and harmony

The rules of harmony and counterpoint are often described as the grammar of tonal music.
As syntax is used to extract the fundamental structure of an utterance by assigning differ-
ent functions to different words, the rules of harmony allow us to specify the different
elements, notes and chords, that fulfill a specific harmonic function. Results of experiments
manipulating the harmonic function of target chords have shown that violations of
harmonic expectancies are associated with P600 components.76,77Interestingly, research on
syntax using ERPs has also shown that different types of syntactic violations, such as
violations of gender, word order or noun-verb agreement, elicit a positive component,
peaking around 600 ms.^78 –^80 Moreover, both components show a similar parietal

     283

Figure 18.5ERPs results averaged across 16 professional musicians and recorded from the parietal electrode (Pz).
Terminal congruous words sung in key (Cong./Cong.) are compared to (A)semantically incongruous words sung
in tune (Incong./Cong.),(B)semantically congruous words sung out of tune (Cong./Incong.), and (C)semanti-
cally incongruous words sung out of tune (Incong./Incong.). The vertical linesmark the onset of the final word of
the excerpts. A large N400 component develops in the 50–600 ms that follow the presentation of semantically
incongruous words (A). In marked contrast, a P600 develops in the 400–1200 ms that follow the presentation of
words sung out of tune (B). Most importantly, both an N400 and a P600 develop in response to the double incon-
gruity (C). (Adapted from Ref. 72.)

Parietal

ABC

N400

N400

P600

P600

Cong./Cong. Cong./Cong. Cong./Cong.

0 400 1000 0 400 1000 0 400 1000 ms

• 2 μV

Incong./ Cong. Cong./Incong. Incong./Incong.