Electric brain responses to inappropriate harmonies during listening to expressive music

Abstract

Objectives: Recent studies with event-related brain potentials (ERPs) investigating music processing found (early) negativities with righthemispheric predominance as a response to inappropriate harmonies within sequences of chords. The stimuli used in those studies were fairly artificial in order to control the experimental factors (e.g. variations in tempo and loudness were eliminated). This raises the question of whether these ERPs can also be elicited during listening to more naturalistic stimuli.Methods: Excerpts from classical piano sonatas were taken from commercial CDs and presented to the participants while recording the continuous electroencephalogram. Expected chords and unexpected (transposed) chords were presented at the end of chord-sequences.Results: Unexpected chords elicited a negativity which was maximal around 250 ms, visible over both hemispheres, and preponderant over right temporal leads.Conclusions: The found negativity is strongly reminiscent to both early right anterior negativity and right anterior-temporal negativity, suggesting that cognitive processes underlying these ERP components are not only elicited with fairly artificial experimental stimuli but also when listening to expressive music. q

Influence of Expressive Versus Mechanical Musical Performance on Short-term Memory for Musical Excerpts

“…Although expressive and mechanical performances can lead to similar parsing of phrases (Palmer & Krumhansl, 1987), and recent research has found the same electrophysiological markers for music-syntactic processing under both performance conditions, some evoked potentials were nevertheless shown to be enhanced for expressive performance (Koelsch & Mulder, 2002;Koelsch, Kilches, Steinbeis, & Schelinski, 2008). Furthermore, expressive performances have more power to evoke emotions than mechanical renderings (e.g., Chapin, Jantzen, Scott Kelso, Steinberg, & Large, 2010;Viellard, Roy, & Peretz, 2011).…”

Towards a neural basis of music perception

“…180-200 ms maximal über rechts-frontalen Elektroden (daher wurde dieser Effekt als early right anterior negativity, ERAN, bezeichnet; Koelsch, 2005;Koelsch et al , im Druck b). In Experimenten, in denen die Darbietung irregulärer Akkorde nicht vorhersagbar ist, hat dieser Effekt eine längere Latenz, und eine eher fronto-temporale Schädelverteilung (auch als right anterior-temporal negativity, RATN, bezeichnet; Patel et al , 1998;Koelsch & Mulder, 2002).…”

Differences in Electric Brain Responses to Melodies and Chords

“…Using only the sequences depicted in Figure 1A-C transposed to different keys gave us the maximum acoustic control over the musical stimulus (for details, see Koelsch et al, 2007; for studies investigating music processing with more naturalistic stimuli, see, e.g., Koelsch, Kilches, Steinbeis, & Schelinski, 2008;Steinbeis, Koelsch, & Sloboda, 2006;Koelsch & Mulder, 2002).…”