Effects of Harmony on Musical Modulations during Active Listening: an MEG Study
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Wen, Ya-Chien
Abstract
Modulation is a significant event in music. While music theory has elucidated the principles of moving from an established tonality to a new tonality, the cognitive mechanisms underlying musical modulations are still poorly understood. To investigate the neural substrates of musical modulations, this magnetoencephalography (MEG) study recorded participants’ neural activity while they were actively listening to musical modulations. Four components of evoked magnetic field were identified and analyzed: P1m, N1m, P2m, and M350. The results suggest that N1m (latency?120 ms) and M350 ( latency?350 ms) may be related to the processing of musical modulations.
The amplitude of N1m differed significantly between the occurrence of the chords of “confirming the new key” and the “pivot chords”. This might be attributed to the tonal ambiguity of the pivot chords. During listening to an unharmonized melody, the amplitude of M350 differed significantly between the occurrence of the tones of “just in the new key” and the tones of “confirming the new key”. The stronger M350 evoked by the tones of “just in the new key” may be attributed to that listeners had to initiate and monitor the updating of working memory when there was no harmonic cue. The present study demonstrates how harmonization influences a modulating melody and how the schema of pitch-naming is shifted under the impact of pivot chords and under cognitive control. N1m may be related to the bottom-up processing of modulation in harmony context, whereas M350 may be related to the top-down control of modulation without harmony context. Our results also suggest the central role of the right posterior temporal lobe in the processing of tonality.
Subjects
harmony
modulation
MEG
temporal lobe
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
index.html
Size
23.49 KB
Format
HTML
Checksum
(MD5):a743a46a255b4632b398ca8433c74489