Citation

Burunat I, Toiviainen P, Alluri V, Bogert B, Ristaniemi T, Sams M, Brattico E. Neuroimage 2015; 124(Pt A): 224-231.

Affiliation

Center for Music in the Brain (MIB), Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Denmark; Cognitive Brain Research Unit (CBRU), Institute of Behavioral Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging (AMI) Centre, Aalto University School of Science, Finland. Electronic address: elvira.brattico@clin.au.dk.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.09.005

PMID

26364862

Abstract

Low-level (timbral) and high-level (tonal and rhythmical) musical features during continuous listening to music, studied by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have been shown to elicit large-scale responses in cognitive, motor, and limbic brain networks. Using a similar methodological approach and a similar group of participants, we aimed to study the replicability of previous findings. Participants' fMRI responses during continuous listening of a tango Nuevo piece were correlated voxelwise against the time series of a set of perceptually validated musical features computationally extracted from the music. The replicability of previous results and the present study was assessed by two approaches: (a) correlating the respective activation maps, and (b) computing the overlap of active voxels between datasets at variable levels of ranked significance. Activity elicited by timbral features was better replicable than activity elicited by tonal and rhythmical ones. These results indicate more reliable processing mechanisms for low-level musical features as compared to more high-level features. The processing of such high-level features is probably more sensitive to the state and traits of the listeners, as well as of their background in music.

Language: en