Mind's Ear in a Musician: Where and When in the Brain

Visually Induced Auditory Expectancy in Music Reading: A Behavioral and Electrophysiological Study

“…For example, the auditory association areas (left) are active during a simple auditory imagery task in which musicians had to imagine the sound of a single note presented visually (Schürmann et al, 2002). In addition, imagery for familiar tunes showed activation in the right auditory association cortex of subjects imaging the continuation of a tune cued by its first few notes (Halpern & Zatorre, 1999).…”

Neuroplasticity of semantic representations for musical instruments in professional musicians

“…There is growing evidence from imaging research that sensorimotor contributions during conceptual activation and explicit mental imagery do not only serve different functions at a computational level, but that these two also involve different cognitive processes and often-although not necessarily-engage different neural tissues (Willems et al, 2010). Furthermore, access to acoustic concept features and auditory imagery also differ with respect to their temporal dynamics: the earliest magnetoencephalographic activity associated with auditory imagery has been found with an average onset latency 170-250 ms in trained musicians who were presented with visual notes and explicitly instructed to imagine the corresponding sounds (Schurmann et al, 2002). By comparison, combined fMRI and ERP evidence has shown that acoustic conceptual features of everyday objects (like telephone) are recruited from the homologue left-hemisphere auditory areas (pSTG/MTG) as early as 150 ms within a word recognition task although this task did not require intentional retrieval of sound information .…”

There’s more to auditory cortex than meets the ear

“…In addition to this study, the important role of auditory cortex in imagery is clearly indicated by various other studies using a variety of techniques, including, magnetoencephalography (Schü rmann et al, 2002), positron emission tomography (Halpern and Zatorre, 1999), and functional MRI (Kraemer et al, 2005); see Zatorre and Halpern (2005) for a review. These diverse studies converge on the finding that neural activity within regions of secondary auditory cortex can occur in the absence of sound, and that this activity likely mediates the phenomenological experience of imagining music.…”