Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Music Perception 17
MMN paradigms may be employed to investigate to investigate relations between musical
events that differ in their level of abstractness. Firstly, simple feature relations may
be investigated (e.g., tones deviating in frequency). In infants, Kushnerenko, Ceponiene,
Balan, Fellman, & Näätänen (2002) demonstrated an MMN in response to the detection
of pitch change that develops during the first year of life. Jing and Benasich (2006)
found no MMN at 3 months while it became apparent at 4 to 5 months and was robust
at 6 months. An MMN may be elicited by violations of an abstract regularity (such as
infrequent tone pairs of descending pitch in a sequence of tone pairs of ascending pitch;
see Korzyukov, Winkler, Gumenyuk, & Alho, 2003). Fujioka, Trainor, Ross, Kakigi,
and Pantev (2004) investigated the processing of melodic contour and interval structure.
An MMN was evoked by pitch contour and interval deviations demonstrating the
automatic processing of abstract changes in both, melody and interval, in the auditory
cortex. A recent study by Brattico, Tervaniemi, Näätänen, and Peretz (2006) presented
non-musicians with unfamiliar melodies, containing pitch deviants that either went outof-key
(one semitone apart from the preceding pitch) or out-of-tune (a quartertone apart
from the preceding pitch). These deviants elicited a MMN indicating a fast and automatic
extraction of the relational properties of a musical scale. For contour representation,
the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) is proposed to be crucial, whereas both
the right and left temporal structures appear to be involved when interval information is
required (Ayotte, Peretz, Rousseau, Bard, & Bojanowski, 2000; Liegeois-Chauvel,
Peretz, Babai, Laguitton, & Chauvel, 1998; Peretz, 1990; Vignolo, 2003). Two types of
temporal organization appear fundamental: rhythmic grouping and metrical regularity.
The cerebellum and the basal ganglia are presumably central for the controlling of
motor and perceptual timing (Janata & Grafton, 2003). As for harmony, the metrical
organization is (at least to some extent) determined by the abstract knowledge about the
Western metrical system (Palmer & Krumhansl, 1990).
Even particular aspects of processing polyphonic music are processed at this stage:
Fujioka, Trainor, Ross, Kakigi, and Pantev (2005) investigated this in a MMN paradigm
using four deviations that occurred either in the high or the low voice and either left the
key or remained within the key of the melody. A larger MMN was found for deviants in
the high voice than in the low voice, suggesting that melodic information of each voice
is encoded separately, with the higher voice more salient than the lower. An enlarged
MMN was also observed for in-key compared to out-of-key changes which might reflect
the size of change (2 vs. 1 semitone for in-key vs. out-of-key changes). This indicates
that tonality is most presumably processed at subsequent cognitive stages. The
brain regions involved in selectively listening to one stream within polyphonic music
were investigated by Janata, Tillmann, and Bharucha (2002). They found a similar spa-