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Recursive music elucidates neural mechanisms supporting the generation and detection of melodic hierarchies
- Source :
- Brain Structure & Function
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2020.
-
Abstract
- The ability to generate complex hierarchical structures is a crucial component of human cognition which can be expressed in the musical domain in the form of hierarchical melodic relations. The neural underpinnings of this ability have been investigated by comparing the perception of well-formed melodies with unexpected sequences of tones. However, these contrasts do not target specifically the representation of rules generating hierarchical structure. Here, we present a novel paradigm in which identical melodic sequences are generated in four steps, according to three different rules: The Recursive rule, generating new hierarchical levels at each step; The Iterative rule, adding tones within a fixed hierarchical level without generating new levels; and a control rule that simply repeats the third step. Using fMRI, we compared brain activity across these rules when participants are imagining the fourth step after listening to the third (generation phase), and when participants listened to a fourth step (test sound phase), either well-formed or a violation. We found that, in comparison with Repetition and Iteration, imagining the fourth step using the Recursive rule activated the superior temporal gyrus (STG). During the test sound phase, we found fronto-temporo-parietal activity and hippocampal de-activation when processing violations, but no differences between rules. STG activation during the generation phase suggests that generating new hierarchical levels from previous steps might rely on retrieving appropriate melodic hierarchy schemas. Previous findings highlighting the role of hippocampus and inferior frontal gyrus may reflect processing of unexpected melodic sequences, rather than hierarchy generation per se. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00429-020-02105-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
Melody
Histology
Computer science
Brain activity and meditation
IFG
media_common.quotation_subject
Speech recognition
Inferior frontal gyrus
Hippocampus
050105 experimental psychology
Young Adult
03 medical and health sciences
Superior temporal gyrus
Cognition
0302 clinical medicine
Hierarchy
Perception
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
media_common
Brain Mapping
Recursion
General Neuroscience
05 social sciences
Brain
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Auditory Perception
Original Article
STG
Female
Repetition (music)
Anatomy
Music
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 18632661 and 18632653
- Volume :
- 225
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Brain Structure and Function
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....8d6484b14c401d43c3f6ea595b5d4b4c