Predictive processing, cognitive control, and tonality stability of music: An fMRI study of chromatic harmony
Journal
Brain and Cognition
Journal Volume
151
Date Issued
2021
Author(s)
Abstract
The present study aimed at identifying the brain regions which preferentially responded to music with medium degrees of key stability. There were three types of auditory stimuli. Diatonic music based strictly on major and minor scales has the highest key stability, whereas atonal music has the lowest key stability. Between these two extremes, chromatic music is characterized by sophisticated uses of out-of-key notes, which challenge the internal model of musical pitch and lead to higher precision-weighted prediction error compared to diatonic and atonal music. The brain activity of 29 adults with excellent relative pitch was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they listened to diatonic music, chromatic music, and atonal random note sequences. Several frontoparietal regions showed significantly greater response to chromatic music than to diatonic music and atonal sequences, including the pre-supplementary motor area (extending into the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, rostrolateral prefrontal cortex, intraparietal sulcus, and precuneus. We suggest that these frontoparietal regions may support working memory processes, hierarchical sequencing, and conflict resolution of remotely related harmonic elements during the predictive processing of chromatic music. This finding suggested a possible correlation between precision-weighted prediction error and the frontoparietal regions implicated in cognitive control. ? 2021
Subjects
adult; article; brain region; clinical article; conflict; controlled study; dorsal anterior cingulate cortex; dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; executive function; female; frontoparietal network; functional magnetic resonance imaging; human; human experiment; intraparietal sulcus; male; music; pitch; precuneus; prediction; supplementary motor area; working memory
SDGs
Type
journal article