This study proposes a novel approach for the analysis of brain responses in the modality of ongoing EEG elicited by the naturalistic and continuous music stimulus. The 512-second long EEG data (recorded with 64 electrodes) are first decomposed into 64 components by independent component analysis (ICA) for each participant. Then, the spatial maps showing dipolar brain activity are selected in terms of the residual dipole variance through a single dipole model in brain imaging, and clustered into a pre-defined number (estimated by the minimum description length) of clusters. Subsequently, the temporal courses of the EEG theta and alpha oscillations of each component for each cluster are produced and correlated with the temporal courses of tonal and rhythmic features of the music. Using this approach, we found that the extracted temporal courses of the theta and alpha oscillations along central and occipital area of scalp in two of the selected clusters significantly correlated with the musical features representing progressions in the rhythmic content of the stimulus. We suggest that this demonstrates that with the proposed approach, we have managed to discover what kinds of brain responses were elicited when Manuscript a participant was listening continuously to the long piece of naturalistic music.
Expertise in music has been investigated for decades and the results have been applied not only in composition, performance and music education, but also in understanding brain plasticity in a larger context. Several studies have revealed a strong connection between auditory and motor processes and listening to and performing music, and music imagination. Recently, as a logical next step in music and movement, the cognitive and affective neurosciences have been directed towards expertise in dance. To understand the versatile and overlapping processes during artistic stimuli, such as music and dance, it is necessary to study them with continuous naturalistic stimuli. Thus, we used long excerpts from the contemporary dance piece Carmen presented with and without music to professional dancers, musicians, and laymen in an EEG laboratory. We were interested in the cortical phase synchrony within each participant group over several frequency bands during uni- and multimodal processing. Dancers had strengthened theta and gamma synchrony during music relative to silence and silent dance, whereas the presence of music decreased systematically the alpha and beta synchrony in musicians. Laymen were the only group of participants with significant results related to dance. Future studies are required to understand whether these results are related to some other factor (such as familiarity to the stimuli), or if our results reveal a new point of view to dance observation and expertise.
When watching performing arts, a wide and complex network of brain processes emerge. These processes can be shaped by professional expertise. When compared to laymen, dancers have enhanced processes in observation of short dance movement and listening to music. But how do the cortical processes differ in musicians and dancers when watching an audio-visual dance performance? In our study, we presented the participants long excerpts from the contemporary dance choreography of Carmen. During multimodal movement of a dancer, theta phase synchrony over the fronto-central electrodes was stronger in dancers when compared to musicians and laymen. In addition, alpha synchrony was decreased in all groups during large rapid movement when compared to nearly motionless parts of the choreography. Our results suggest an enhanced cortical communication in dancers when watching dance and, further, that this enhancement is rather related to multimodal, cognitive and emotional processes than to simple observation of dance movement.
The neural responses to simple tones and short sound sequences have been studied extensively. However, in reality the sounds surrounding us are spectrally and temporally complex, dynamic and overlapping. Thus, research using natural sounds is crucial in understanding the operation of the brain in its natural environment. Music is an excellent example of natural stimulation which, in addition to sensory responses, elicits vast cognitive and emotional processes in the brain. Here we show that the preattentive P50 response evoked by rapid increases in timbral brightness during continuous music is enhanced in dancers when compared to musicians and laymen. In dance, fast changes in brightness are often emphasized with a significant change in movement. In addition, the auditory N100 and P200 responses are suppressed and sped up in dancers, musicians and laymen when music is accompanied with a dance choreography. These results were obtained with a novel event-related potential (ERP) method for natural music. They suggest that we can begin studying the brain with long pieces of natural music using the ERP method of electroencephalography (EEG) as has already been done with functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), these two brain imaging methods complementing each other.
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