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Given the evolutionary importance of social ties for survival, humans are thought to have evolved psychobiological mechanisms to monitor and safeguard the status of their social bonds. At the psychological level, self-esteem is proposed to function as a gauge—‘sociometer’—reflecting one’s social belongingness status. At the biological level, endogenous opioids appear to be an important substrate for the hedonic signalling needed to regulate social behaviour. We investigated whether endogenous opioids may serve as the biological correlate of the sociometer. We administered 50 mg naltrexone (an opioid receptor antagonist) and placebo in a counterbalanced order to 26 male and female participants on two occasions ∼1 week apart. Participants reported lower levels of self-esteem—particularly self-liking—on the naltrexone (vs placebo) day. We also explored a potential behavioural consequence of naltrexone administration: attentional bias to accepting (smiling) faces—an early-stage perceptual process thought to maximize opportunities to restore social connection. Participants exhibited heightened attentional bias towards accepting faces on the naltrexone (vs placebo) day, which we interpret as an indicator of heightened social need under opioid receptor blockade. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of sociality as well as the relationship between adverse social conditions, low self-esteem and psychopathology.

The study of sleep and wakefulness can inform debates about the nature of consciousness. We argue that sleep and wakefulness fall along a multidimensional continuum and that inconsistencies and paradoxes with the accounts put forth by Merker et al. and Tononi can be understood in terms of a pervasive false dichotomy between these two states.

Although much is known about the brain mechanisms underlying music perception and cognition, there is much work to be done in understanding aesthetic responses to music: Why does music make us feel the way we do? Why does it make us feel anything? In the article under discussion, the authors suggest that the brain’s own endogenous opioids mediate musical emotion, using the hypothesis of naltrexone-induced musical anhedonia. They conclude that endogenous opioids are critical to experiencing both positive and negative emotions in music and that music uses the same reward pathways as food, drugs, and sexual pleasure. Their findings add to the growing body of evidence for the evolutionary biological substrates of music.

I propose an adjunct to the two models presented in the target articles, a function of music that is ubiquitous and would have solved a clear adaptive problem, that of transmitting important survival information among pre-literate humans. This class of knowledge songs uniquely preserved cultural, botanical, medical, safety, and practical information that increased the adaptive fitness of societies.

We conducted three experiments to test the fluency-misattribution account of auditory hindsight bias. According to this account, prior exposure to a clearly presented auditory stimulus produces fluent (improved) processing of a distorted version of that stimulus, which results in participants mistakenly rating that item as easy to identify. In all experiments, participants in an exposure phase heard clearly spoken words zero, one, three, or six times. In the test phase, we examined auditory hindsight bias by manipulating whether participants heard a clear version of a target word just prior to hearing the distorted version of that word. Participants then estimated the ability of naïve peers to identify the distorted word. Auditory hindsight bias and the number of priming presentations during the exposure phase interacted underadditively in their prediction of participants' estimates: When no clear version of the target word appeared prior to the distorted version of that word in the test phase, participants identified target words more often the more frequently they heard the clear word in the exposure phase. Conversely, hearing a clear version of the target word at test produced similar estimates, regardless of the number of times participants heard clear versions of those words during the exposure phase. As per Roberts and Sternberg's (Attention and Performance XIV, pp. 611-653, 1993) additive factors logic, this finding suggests that both auditory hindsight bias and repetition priming contribute to a common process, which we propose involves a misattribution of processing fluency. We conclude that misattribution of fluency accounts for auditory hindsight bias.

The urge to move to music is universal among humans. Unlike visual art, which is manifest across space, music is manifest across time. When listeners get carried away by the music, either through movement (such as dancing) or through reverie (such as trance), it is usually the temporal qualities of the music—its pulse, tempo, and rhythmic patterns—that put them in this state. In this article, we review studies addressing rhythm, meter, movement, synchronization, entrainment, the perception of groove, and other temporal factors that constitute a first step to understanding how and why music literally moves us. The experiments we review span a range of methodological techniques, including neuroimaging, psychophysics, and traditional behavioral experiments, and we also summarize the current studies of animal synchronization, engaging an evolutionary perspective on human rhythmic perception and cognition.

How does the human neurophysiological system self-organize to achieve optimal phase relationships among joints and limbs, such as in the composite rhythms of butterfly and front crawl swimming, drumming, or dancing? We conducted a systematic review of literature relating to CNS control of phase among joint/limbs in continuous rhythmic activities. SCOPUS and Web of Science were searched using keywords ‘Phase AND Rhythm AND Coordination’. This yielded 998 matches from which 23 papers were extracted for inclusion based on screening criteria. The empirical evidence arising from in-vivo, fictive, in-vitro, and modelling of neural control in humans, other species, and robots indicates that the control of movement is facilitated and simplified by innervating muscle synergies by way of spinal central pattern generators (CPGs). These typically behave like oscillators enabling stable repetition across cycles of movements. This approach provides a foundation to guide the design of empirical research in human swimming and other limb independent activities. For example, future research could be conducted to explore whether the two-layer CPG model proposed by Saltiel et al [1] to explain locomotion in cats might also explain the complex relationships among the cyclical motions in human swimming.

Functional brain imaging has revealed much about the neuroanatomical substrates of higher cognition, including music, language, learning, and memory. The technique lends itself to studying of groups of individuals. In contrast, the nature of expert performance is typically studied through the examination of exceptional individuals using behavioral case studies and retrospective biography. Here, we combined fMRI and the study of an individual who is a world-class expert musician and composer in order to better understand the neural underpinnings of his music perception and cognition, in particular, his mental representations for music. We used state of the art multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) and representational dissimilarity analysis (RDA) in a fixed set of brain regions to test three exploratory hypotheses with the musician Sting: (1) Composing would recruit neutral structures that are both unique and distinguishable from other creative acts, such as composing prose or visual art; (2) listening and imagining music would recruit similar neural regions, indicating that musical memory shares anatomical substrates with music listening; (3) the MVPA and RDA results would help us to map the representational space for music, revealing which musical pieces and genres are perceived to be similar in the musician’s mental models for music. Our hypotheses were confirmed. The act of composing, and even of imagining elements of the composed piece separately, such as melody and rhythm, activated a similar cluster of brain regions, and were distinct from prose and visual art. Listened and imagined music showed high similarity, and in addition, notable similarity/dissimilarity patterns emerged among the various pieces used as stimuli: Muzak and Top 100/Pop songs were far from all other musical styles in Mahalanobis distance (Euclidean representational space), whereas jazz, R&B, tango and rock were comparatively close. Closer inspection revealed principaled explanations for the similarity clusters found, based on key, tempo, motif, and orchestration.

Functional neuroimaging can provide insight into the neurobiological factors that contribute to the variations in individual hearing outcomes following cochlear implantation. To date, measuring neural activity within the auditory cortex of cochlear implant (CI) recipients has been challenging, primarily because the use of traditional neuroimaging techniques is limited in people with CIs. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an emerging technology that offers benefits in this population because it is non-invasive, compatible with CI devices, and not subject to electrical artifacts. However, there are important considerations to be made when using fNIRS to maximize the signal to noise ratio and to best identify meaningful cortical responses. This review considers these issues, the current data, and future directions for using fNIRS as a clinical application in individuals with CIs. This article is part of a Special Issue entitledAnnual Reviews 2016.

Research suggests that musical preferences are linked to personality, but this research has been hindered by genre-based theories and methods. We address this limitation using a novel method based on the actual attributes that people perceive from music. In Study 1, using 102 musical pieces representing 26 genres and subgenres, we show that 38 perceived attributes in music can be organized into three basic dimensions: arousal, valence, and depth. In Study 2 ( N = 9,454), we show that people’s preferences for these musical attributes reflected their self-ratings of personality traits. Importantly, personality was found to predict musical preferences above and beyond demographic variables. These findings advance previous theory and research and have direct applications for the music industry, recommendation algorithms, and health-care professionals.

Minerva’s Multimodal Communications cornerstone course brings together theory and findings in rhetoric, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, neurobiology, and design theory and applies them both to new forms of communication--made possible by the technological revolution of the last few decades--and traditional forms of expression, such as speech, gestures, music, and art. The aim of the course is to teach our students to become persuasive communicators who will have an impact in the world. The tools they hone in the course provide them with essential skills they can apply to careers in the sciences, humanities, business, the arts and in their everyday lives. This chapter summarizes the highly interactive and iterative approaches we use in the course to cultivate the core competency of effective communication, which students must master in order to meet their potential to become leaders and innovators.

Most of what we hear about the connection between music and health is largely anecdotal. The past decade has seen a renewed interest in the connections from researchers conducting rigorous experimental studies. In this broad overview, I will review the current state of knowledge, touching on music therapy for both physical and psychological health, music for the management of pain, and musical interventions for dementia patients.

Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasant stimuli. Although anhedonia is a prominent feature of many psychiatric disorders, trait anhedonia is also observed dimensionally in healthy individuals. Currently, the neurobiological basis of anhedonia is poorly understood because it has been mainly investigated in patients with psychiatric disorders. Thus, previous studies have not been able to adequately disentangle the neural correlates of anhedonia from other clinical symptoms. In this study, trait anhedonia was assessed in well-characterized healthy participants with no history of Axis I psychiatric illness. Functional magnetic resonance imaging with musical stimuli was used to examine brain responses and effective connectivity in relation to individual differences in anhedonia. We found that trait anhedonia was negatively correlated with pleasantness ratings of music stimuli and with activation of key brain structures involved in reward processing, including nucleus accumbens (NAc), basal forebrain and hypothalamus which are linked by the medial forebrain bundle to the ventral tegmental area (VTA). Brain regions important for processing salient emotional stimuli, including anterior insula and orbitofrontal cortex were also negatively correlated with trait anhedonia. Furthermore, effective connectivity between NAc, VTA and paralimbic areas, that regulate emotional reactivity to hedonic stimuli, was negatively correlated with trait anhedonia. Our results indicate that trait anhedonia is associated with reduced reactivity and connectivity of mesolimbic and related limbic and paralimbic systems involved in reward processing. Critically, this association can be detected even in individuals without psychiatric illness. Our findings have important implications both for understanding the neurobiological basis of anhedonia and for the treatment of anhedonia in psychiatric disorders.

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) frequently display unusual reactions to sound, ranging from idiosyncratic responses to avoidances. This atypical sensitivity often decreases over time, but little is known about how early avoidance of sounds might affect later enjoyment of auditory stimuli such as music. We surveyed children and adolescents with ASD, and an age-matched group of typically developing (TD) adolescents and the parents of both groups about early auditory sensitivities and musical experience, preferences, and enjoyment in later childhood and adolescence using an adaptation of the Queen’s University Music Questionnaire and the Salk and McGill Musical Inventory (SAMMI). Results showed that, although the group with ASD experienced much more auditory hypersensitivity than the TD group during childhood, there were no differences between groups in musical ability, memory, reproduction, creativity, or interest and emotional responsivity to music in later childhood and adolescence; both groups displayed a similar variety of genres in their musical preferences, with the exception that more participants with ASD reported classical as their favorite musical genre. We suggest that this latter pattern may arise from their lesser use of music as a mark of social affiliation and peer-group bonding, or from the increased complexity of classical music relative to other genres. We conclude that early childhood hypersensitivities to sound do not have detrimental effects on later enjoyment of music, although children and adolescents with ASD may use music in ways that differ from their TD peers.

Music is a cultural universal and a rich part of the human experience. However, little is known about common brain systems that support the processing and integration of extended, naturalistic ‘real-world’ music stimuli. We examined this question by presenting extended excerpts of symphonic music, and two pseudomusical stimuli in which the temporal and spectral structure of the Natural Music condition were disrupted, to non-musician participants undergoing functional brain imaging and analysing synchronized spatiotemporal activity patterns between listeners. We found that music synchronizes brain responses across listeners in bilateral auditory midbrain and thalamus, primary auditory and auditory association cortex, right-lateralized structures in frontal and parietal cortex, and motor planning regions of the brain. These effects were greater for natural music compared to the pseudo-musical control conditions. Remarkably, inter-subject synchronization in the inferior colliculus and medial geniculate nucleus was also greater for the natural music condition, indicating that synchronization at these early stages of auditory processing is not simply driven by spectro-temporal features of the stimulus. Increased synchronization during music listening was also evident in a right-hemisphere fronto-parietal attention network and bilateral cortical regions involved in motor planning. While these brain structures have previously been implicated in various aspects of musical processing, our results are the first to show that these regions track structural elements of a musical stimulus over extended time periods lasting minutes. Our results show that a hierarchical distributed network is synchronized between individuals during the processing of extended musical sequences, and provide new insight into the temporal integration of complex and biologically salient auditory sequences.

Music’s universality and its ability to deeply affect emotions suggest an evolutionary origin. Previous investigators have found that naltrexone (NTX), a μ-opioid antagonist, may induce reversible anhedonia, attenuating both positive and negative emotions. The neurochemical basis of musical experience is not well-understood, and the NTX-induced anhedonia hypothesis has not been tested with music. Accordingly, we administered NTX or placebo on two different days in a double-blind crossover study, and assessed participants’ responses to music using both psychophysiological (objective) and behavioral (subjective) measures. We found that both positive and negative emotions were attenuated. We conclude that endogenous opioids are critical to experiencing both positive and negative emotions in music, and that music uses the same reward pathways as food, drug and sexual pleasure. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence for the evolutionary biological substrates of music.

Much of what we know (or think we know) about the brain rests on an assumption called the localization hypothesis: the brain is not just a mass of undifferentiated tissue, but rather, specific neural regions underlie distinctive behaviors, thoughts, and actions. This is reflected in the names we give to brain regions, such as motor cortex (for movement), sensory cortex (for processing information from the five senses), auditory cortex, and visual cortex. Evidence for regional specialization comes from case studies of patients with lesions, and from various neuroimaging technologies (Positron Emission Tomography, or PET; functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI; Magnetoencephalography, or MEG; Electroencephalography, or EEG), as well as animal studies.It is seductive to think of a one function-one brain mapping schema, whereby function x is handled specifically and exclusively by brain region y and so on. There may be some truth to this, but the situation is far more complex. The human brain is massively parallel and distributed. Although aspects of certain functions can be localized, other functions are likely to be distributed widely across different brain regions in functional circuits or networks. Lower level functions such as pitch perception are more likely to be localized to specific regions, whereas higher-level functions such as melody recognition are more likely to involve networks taking inputs from several widely dispersed regions. It is important to bear in mind these general principles when thinking about brain regions and musical activities.This paper reviews neuromusical behaviors in three domains: (1) perceptual-cognitive, including the communicative functions of music and speech, (2) emotional reactions to music, and (3) effects of music on immune function and health.Perceptual-Cognitive Processing of MusicMusic consists of six fundamental attributes: pitch, duration, loudness, timbre, spatial location, and reverberant environment (Levitin, 2010). A set of two or more pitches gives rise to contour and melody, and a set of two or more durations gives rise to rhythm. Thus, melody and rhythm are secondary aspects of these fundamental attributes.Unlike light, which is easily transmitted in a vacuum, sound requires a medium of transduction such as air or water. Pressure waves in the air (for example) stimulate the tympanic membrane (eardrum) and to some extent, the bones surrounding the ear; these pressure waves are turned into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain. Sound can activate unconscious, reflex actions (mediated by the brain stem and pons), the most well-known of these being the startle reflex, which occurs before any conscious process alerts us of an impending danger.One striking aspect of the brain's response to sound is that the neural response to sound is isomorphic to the sound itself. In other words, if we look at the waveform of a piece of music, and then at the waveform of the brain's response to that music, the two waveforms are nearly identical. This is true for single cell recordings in the inferior colliculus (Janata, 1997) or evoked potentials of the brainstem taken from the scalp (Skoe & Kraus, 2010). In fact, the output of such brain measures can be connected to a loudspeaker, and sounds approximating the music itself can be heard (Levitin, 2007). These findings provide evidence that pitch perception, one of the foundations of music, is innately wired into our brains.Pitch is encoded at every level of the auditory system, beginning with the cochlea, inside of which exists a tonotopic (pitch by location) mapping. In other words, if we could uncoil the cochlea and flatten it out, we would see that its hair cells on one end are maximally responsive to low frequencies, hair cells on the other are maximally responsive to high frequencies, and intermediate regions are responsive to intermediate frequencies. In effect, the cochlea is laid out like a piano keyboard (but without the height differential between black keys and white keys! …

there is overwhelming anecdotal and empirical evidence for individual differences in musical preferences. However, little is known about what drives those preferences. Are people drawn to particular musical genres (e.g., rap, jazz) or to certain musical properties (e.g., lively, loud)? Recent findings suggest that musical preferences can be conceptualized in terms of five orthogonal dimensions: Mellow, Unpretentious, Sophisticated, Intense, and Contemporary (conveniently, MUSIC). The aim of the present research is to replicate and extend that work by empirically examining the hypothesis that musical preferences are based on preferences for particular musical properties and psychological attributes as opposed to musical genres. Findings from Study 1 replicated the five-factor MUSIC structure using musical excerpts from a variety of genres and subgenres and revealed musical attributes that differentiate each factor. Results from Studies 2 and 3 show that the MUSIC structure is recoverable using musical pieces from only the jazz and rock genres, respectively. Taken together, the current work provides strong evidence that preferences for music are determined by specific musical attributes and that the MUSIC model is a robust framework for conceptualizing and measuring such preferences.

Much of our enjoyment of music comes from its balance of predictability and surprise. Musical pitch fluctuations follow a 1/ f power law that precisely achieves this balance. Musical rhythms, especially those of Western classical music, are considered highly regular and predictable, and this predictability has been hypothesized to underlie rhythm's contribution to our enjoyment of music. Are musical rhythms indeed entirely predictable and how do they vary with genre and composer? To answer this question, we analyzed the rhythm spectra of 1,788 movements from 558 compositions of Western classical music. We found that an overwhelming majority of rhythms obeyed a 1/ f β power law across 16 subgenres and 40 composers, with β ranging from ∼0.5–1. Notably, classical composers, whose compositions are known to exhibit nearly identical 1/ f pitch spectra, demonstrated distinctive 1/ f rhythm spectra: Beethoven's rhythms were among the most predictable, and Mozart's among the least. Our finding of the ubiquity of 1/ f rhythm spectra in compositions spanning nearly four centuries demonstrates that, as with musical pitch, musical rhythms also exhibit a balance of predictability and surprise that could contribute in a fundamental way to our aesthetic experience of music. Although music compositions are intended to be performed, the fact that the notated rhythms follow a 1/ f spectrum indicates that such structure is no mere artifact of performance or perception, but rather, exists within the written composition before the music is performed. Furthermore, composers systematically manipulate (consciously or otherwise) the predictability in 1/ f rhythms to give their compositions unique identities.

in this review we sought to document the longitudinal course of empirical studies in the journal Music Perception, from the journal’s first issue in 1983 to 2010. The aim was to systematically characterize the nature of empirical research in one of the principal peer-reviewed outlets for work in our field, and to consider these data as a sample representing the overall course of research across the last three decades. Specific domains examined within each article were: Topics, Participants, Stimuli, Materials, and Outcome Measures. In total, 384 empirical articles in the journal were examined. In addition, relevant details were extracted from the full set of 578 articles regarding geographic and disciplinary (departmental) distribution of the authors. Together, the data we report allow an examination of 26-year trends in music research. These are made available in a database that is fully searchable or sortable by interested researchers.

Existing microarray gene expression profiling studies of tonic/chronic pain were subjected to meta-analysis to identify genes found to be regulated by these pain states in multiple, independent experiments. Twenty studies published from 2002 to 2008 were identified, describing the statistically significant regulation of 2254 genes. Of those, a total of 79 genes were found to be statistically significant "hits" in 4 or more independent microarray experiments, corresponding to a conservative P

We investigate non-verbal communication through expressive body movement and musical sound, to reveal higher cognitive processes involved in the integration of emotion from multiple sensory modalities. Participants heard, saw, or both heard and saw recordings of a Stravinsky solo clarinet piece, performed with three distinct expressive styles: restrained, standard, and exaggerated intention. Participants used a 5-point Likert scale to rate each performance on 19 different emotional qualities. The data analysis revealed that variations in expressive intention had their greatest impact when the performances could be seen; the ratings from participants who could only hear the performances were the same across the three expressive styles. Evidence was also found for an interaction effect leading to an emergent property, intensity of positive emotion, when participants both heard and saw the musical performances. An exploratory factor analysis revealed orthogonal dimensions for positive and negative emotions, which may account for the subjective experience that many listeners report of having multi-valent or complex reactions to music, such as "bittersweet."

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) succeed at a range of musical tasks. The ability to recognize musical emotion as belonging to one of four categories (happy, sad, scared or peaceful) was assessed in high-functioning adolescents with ASD (N = 26) and adolescents with typical development (TD, N = 26) with comparable performance IQ, auditory working memory, and musical training and experience. When verbal IQ was controlled for, there was no significant effect of diagnostic group. Adolescents with ASD rated the intensity of the emotions similarly to adolescents with TD and reported greater confidence in their responses when they had correctly (vs. incorrectly) recognized the emotions. These findings are reviewed within the context of the amygdala theory of autism.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are impaired in understanding the emotional undertones of speech, many of which are communicated through prosody. Musical performance also employs a form of prosody to communicate emotion, and the goal of this study was to examine the ability of adolescents with ASD to understand musical emotion. We designed an experiment in which each musical stimulus served as its own control while we varied the emotional expressivity by manipulating timing and amplitude variation. We asked children and adolescents with ASD and matched controls as well as individuals with Williams syndrome to rate how emotional these excerpts sounded. Results show that children and adolescents with ASD are impaired relative to matched controls and individuals with Williams syndrome at judging the difference in emotionality among the expressivity levels. Implications for theories of emotion in autism are discussed in light of these findings.

This paper describes ongoing research into the design of new digital musical instruments (DMIs). While many new DMIs have been created using a variety of sensors, there has been relatively little empirical research into determining the optimal choice of sensor for control of specific musical functions. In this paper we attempt to identify an optimal choice of sensor for the control of parameter modulations in a DMI. Two experiments were conducted. In the first, pianists and violinists were tested on three strategies for producing pitch modulations. Both subjective user ratings and objective performance scores were analysed. The results suggest that modulated applied pressure is the optimal control for pitch modulation. Preference and performance did not appear to be directly mediated by previous musical experience. In the second experiment, the accuracy, stability and depth of modulation were measured for a number of musicians performing modulations with each of three control strategies. Results ...

High-functioning adolescents with ASD and matched controls were presented with animations that depicted varying levels of social interaction and were either accompanied by music or silent. Participants described the events of the animation, and we scored responses for intentionality, appropriateness, and length of description. Adolescents with ASD were less likely to make social attributions, especially for those animations with the most complex social interactions. When stimuli were accompanied by music, both groups were equally impaired in appropriateness and intentionality. We conclude that adolescents with ASD perceive and integrate musical soundtracks with visual displays equivalent to typically developing individuals.

The study of music perception and cognition is one of the oldest topics in experimental psychology. The last 20 years have seen an increased interest in understanding the functional neuroanatomy of music processing in humans, using a variety of technologies including fMRI, PET, ERP, MEG, and lesion studies. We review current findings in the context of a rich intellectual history of research, organized by the cognitive systems underlying different aspects of human musical behavior. We pay special attention to the perception of components of musical processing, musical structure, laterality effects, cultural issues, links between music and movement, emotional processing, expertise, and the amusias. Current trends are noted, such as the increased interest in evolutionary origins of music and comparisons of music and language. The review serves to demonstrate the important role that music can play in informing broad theories of higher order cognitive processes such as music in humans.

Recent advances in data recording technology have given researchers new ways of collecting on-line and continuous data for analyzing input-output systems. For example, continuous response digital interfaces are increasingly used in psychophysics. The statistical problem related to these input-output systems reduces to linking time-varying covariates to a continuous response variate. Using real-time data obtained from an experiment in psychoacoustics, we showcase new statistical tools that incorporate dynamical elements of an input-output system. We employ functional data analysis (FDA) methods and a simple differential equation to analyze and model the continuous responses. Furthermore, we outline the issues involved in analyzing input-output systems when the exact form of the underlying mathematical model is not known. Finally, we develop a calibration method to facilitate inter-subject and intra-subject comparisons.

SUMMARY The real world presents our sensory systems with a continuous stream of undifferentiated information. Segmentation of this stream at event boundaries is necessary for object identification andfeature extraction. Here, we investigate the neural dynamics of event segmentation in entire musical symphonies under natural listening conditions. We isolated time-dependent sequences of brain responses in a 10 s window surrounding transitions between movements of symphonic works. A strikingly right-lateralized network of brain regions showed peak response during the movement transitions when, paradoxically, there was no physical stimulus. Model-dependent and model-free analysis techniques provided converging evidence for activity in two distinct functional networks at the movement transition: a ventral fronto-temporal network associated with detecting salient events, followed in time by a dorsal fronto-parietal network associated with maintaining attention and updating working memory. Our study provides direct experimental evidence for dissociable and causally linked ventral and dorsal networks during event segmentation of ecologically valid auditory stimuli.