Natural Music Evokes Correlated EEG Responses Reflecting Temporal Structure and Beat

Abstract

The brain activity of multiple subjects has been shown to synchronize during salient moments of natural stimuli, suggesting that correlation of neural responses indexes a brain state operationally termed 'engagement'. While past electroencephalography (EEG) studies have considered both auditory and visual stimuli, the extent to which these results generalize to music-a temporally structured stimulus for which the brain has evolved specialized circuitry-is less understood. Here we investigated neural correlation during natural music listening by recording dense-array EEG responses from N = 48 adult listeners as they heard real-world musical works, some of which were temporally disrupted through shuffling of short-term segments (measures), reversal, or randomization of phase spectra. We measured neural correlation across responses (inter-subject correlation) and between responses and stimulus envelope fluctuations (stimulus-response correlation) in the time and frequency domains. Stimuli retaining basic musical features evoked significantly correlated neural responses in all analyses.However, while unedited songs were self-reported as most pleasant, time-domain correlations were highest during measure-shuffled versions. Frequency-domain measures of correlation (coherence) peaked at frequencies related to the musical beat, although the magnitudes of these spectral peaks did not explain the observed temporal correlations.Our findings show that natural music evokes significant inter-subject and stimulusresponse correlations, and suggest that the neural correlates of musical engagement may be distinct from those of enjoyment. Keywords Electroencephalography (EEG) Natural stimuli Neural decoding Neural correlation Music perception Engagement Declarations of interest NoneOver the past 15 years, neuroscience has begun to unravel the brain's processing of natural 2 audiovisual stimuli. These advances have been facilitated by the discovery that neural re-3 sponses are significantly correlated across individuals or stimulus repetitions (Hasson et al., 4 2010). This inter-subject correlation (ISC) approach originated in functional magnetic reso-5 nance imaging (fMRI) research (Hasson et al., 2004) and has more recently gained traction 6 tigate the extent to which the correlation approach can be applied to responses to natural 26 music. Instrumental music, particularly from the Western classical tradition of the 18-19th 27 centuries, is often compared to narrative (Maus, 1991). However, a number of factors chal-28 lenge the notion of music as a narrative art and, for the purposes of this study, distinguish 29 music for separate consideration. 30 Correlation of neural responses to natural music has been performed in various imaging 31 modalities. fMRI studies have linked neural correlation during music listening to computa-32 tionally extracted, time-varying acoustical features (Alluri et al., 2012; Trost et al., 2015) 33 and have shown that perturbing music's temporal and spectral characteristics reduces ISC 34 (Abrams e...

Inter‐subject correlation of electroencephalographic and behavioural responses reflects time‐varying engagement with natural music

“…Anonymized data supporting the findings of this study (i.e., raw, continuous EEG recordings; preprocessed, aggregated EEG trials; behavioural ratings; and continuous behavioural responses) are openly available from the Stanford Digital Repository as part of the Naturalistic Music EEG Dataset—Elgar (NMED‐E) at https://purl.stanford.edu/pp371jh5722 (Kaneshiro et al, 2021).…”