Music Listening, Music Therapy, Phenomenology and Neuroscience

Appendix 3.03 Survey of The Neurosciences

and Music III Conference 2008

Disorders and Plasticity

Title, Category

Aim

Mus. Material, Cultural Ref.

Technology & Procedure

Main focus of interest

Conclusion

68. Palmer et al.

(470

-480)

Neural correlates of contextual eff

ects

Cat. 13: Expectation

Cat. 15: Structure 69S

. Lidji et al.

(481

-484)

MMN to vowel and pitch

Cat.1: Pitch

Cat. 6: Phonemes

70S

. Neuhaus et al.
(485

-489)

ERP study on musical form perception

Cat. 15: Musical form

71S

. Nguyen et al.
(490

-493)

Tonal language processing in amusia Cat. 6: Language

Cat. 11: Deficit

To investigate neural responses

to timbral,

temporal, and melodic

accents

as

they

coexist in a

longer melodic context To investigate whether vowel and pitch changes are proc

essed as integrated or

separated units at an early preattentive level indexed by the

Mismatch Negativity

(MMN

) in sung stimuli

To investigate how consecutive phrase patterns in the musical form types AABB and ABAB are conjoined perceptually

To examine the transfer of deficit

between music and

language by examining the effects of impaired musical pitch perception on the discrimination of lexical tones

Melodic tones: piano timbre. Timbre deviants: steel guitar.

6 Melodies of 17 isochronous tones system

atically com

• 
  

bining a) ascending

-descend

• 
  

ing patterns. b) no

, one, or

two temporal accents. c

) n

o,

or one timbral deviant tone

CR: Western

Standards: two synthesized vowels sung on C3 (130 Hz) and C#3 (138 Hz). Deviants: pitch height, vowel identity, or both

CR: Neutral 150 8

-bar piano melodies in

C, E and Ab major. Half of them were of type AABB, half type ABAB

CR: Western

98 words spoken by a female native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, with 1 of 4 possible tones: level, mid

-rising,

dipping, and hi

gh

-falling tone

CR: French/Chinese

EEG: E

vent-

related potential

responses

(ERPs)

to

melodies. 16 musically trained young adult listeners

. Task in

order to ensure attentive processing:

Indicate timbre

changes at the end of each trial

EEG:

Event

-Related

Potentials (

ERP

) recorded

from 12 nonmusicians watching a silent movie, while sequences of repetitive standard sounds and rare deviants were presented through headphones

EEG:

Event

-Related

Potentials (

ERP

) recorded

from 16 nonexpert listeners. Task: to evaluate whether adjacent or nonadjacent patterns are related to each other

20 amusic and 20 control French-

speaking

participants

listened to pairs of words, half using same tone, half using different tones

.Task: Judge

same or different

Detection accuracy

and ERPs

were measured for the accent manipulations. Grand average group data for Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and

P300 responses

Whether Mismatch Negativity (MMN) responses produce additive effects when manipulated simultaneously in a single stimulus (d

ouble

deviant) Grand average ERPs for form types AABB and ABAB. Especially

an anterior

N300

To assess whether amusic individuals would be able to discriminate pitch variations in an unfamiliar language

Listeners’ neural responses to musical s

tructure

changed systematically as sequential predictability and listeners’ expectations changed across the melodic context MMN

to vowel and pitch

deviants did not show significant additivity. Suggestion: vowel and pitch are processed by shared neural s

ubstrates at the

preattentive level

73% of melodies evaluated as ”hierarchical”. ERP data show that brain responses are strongly affected by form type, but do not correlate with the rating decisions

Even if the amusic group performed significantly b

elow

the control group, there was a high degree of overlap between the scores obtained by amusics and controls