Neural basis of music imagery and the effect of musical expertise

Herholz, Sibylle C.; Lappe, Claudia; Knief, Arne; Pantev, Christo

doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06515.x

Cited by 94 publications

(91 citation statements)

References 70 publications

(167 reference statements)

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“…Studies of perceptuomotor integration in music, however, have mainly studied classically-trained musicians, frequently contrasted with non-musicians (Ohnishi et al, 2001;Baumann et al, 2007;Haslinger et al, 2005;Drost et al, 2005;Bangert et al, 2006;Mutschler et al, 2007;Herholz et al, 2008;Trimarchi and Luzzatti, 2011;Novembre and Keller, 2011;Stewart et al, 2013). This comparison restricts the scope of the study of the neural substrate of musical skill considerably.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Differential parietal and temporal contributions to music perception in improvising and score-dependent musicians, an fMRI study

Harris

Jong

2015

Brain Research

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Using fMRI, cerebral activations were studied in 24 classically-trained keyboard performers and 12 musically unskilled control subjects. Two groups of musicians were recruited: improvising (n=12) and score-dependent (non-improvising) musicians (n=12). While listening to both familiar and unfamiliar music, subjects either (covertly) appraised the presented music performance or imagined they were playing the music themselves. We hypothesized that improvising musicians would exhibit enhanced efficiency of audiomotor transformation reflected by stronger ventral premotor activation. Statistical Parametric Mapping revealed that, while virtually 'playing along׳ with the music, improvising musicians exhibited activation of a right-hemisphere distribution of cerebral areas including posterior-superior parietal and dorsal premotor cortex. Involvement of these right-hemisphere dorsal stream areas suggests that improvising musicians recruited an amodal spatial processing system subserving pitch-to-space transformations to facilitate their virtual motor performance. Score-dependent musicians recruited a primarily left-hemisphere pattern of motor areas together with the posterior part of the right superior temporal sulcus, suggesting a relationship between aural discrimination and symbolic representation. Activations in bilateral auditory cortex were significantly larger for improvising musicians than for score-dependent musicians, suggesting enhanced top-down effects on aural perception. Our results suggest that learning to play a music instrument primarily from notation predisposes musicians toward aural identification and discrimination, while learning by improvisation involves audio-spatial-motor transformations, not only during performance, but also perception.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Differential parietal and temporal contributions to music perception in improvising and score-dependent musicians, an fMRI study

Harris

Jong

2015

Brain Research

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“…Cognitive psychology has shown that imaginal experiences are psychologically real in so far as they can be quantified, and because they share features of real perception, including temporal accuracy and pitch acuity (57,58). Several neuroimaging studies have shown the neural reality of this phenomenon because, even in the absence of sound, portions of belt or parabelt auditory cortex are consistently recruited when people perform specific imagery tasks (59,60). This imagery ability is relevant here because it shows that auditory cortex must contain memory traces of past perceptual events, and that these traces are not merely semantic in nature, but rather reflect perceptual attributes of the originally experienced sound.…”

Section: Neurobiology Of Musical Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From perception to pleasure: Music and its neural substrates

Zatorre

Salimpoor

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

406

297

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Music has existed in human societies since prehistory, perhaps because it allows expression and regulation of emotion and evokes pleasure. In this review, we present findings from cognitive neuroscience that bear on the question of how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses. First, we identify some of the auditory cortical circuits that are responsible for encoding and storing tonal patterns and discuss evidence that cortical loops between auditory and frontal cortices are important for maintaining musical information in working memory and for the recognition of structural regularities in musical patterns, which then lead to expectancies. Second, we review evidence concerning the mesolimbic striatal system and its involvement in reward, motivation, and pleasure in other domains. Recent data indicate that this dopaminergic system mediates pleasure associated with music; specifically, reward value for music can be coded by activity levels in the nucleus accumbens, whose functional connectivity with auditory and frontal areas increases as a function of increasing musical reward. We propose that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable predictions and expectancies to emerge from sound patterns and subcortical systems responsible for reward and valuation.cognition | functional imaging | auditory cortex S ome 40,000 years ago, a person-a musician-picked up a vulture bone that had delicately and precisely incised holes along its length and blew upon it to play a tune. We know this thanks to recent remarkable archeological finds (Fig. 1) near the Danube, where several such flutes were uncovered (1). What bears reflection here is that, for an instrument to exist in the upper Paleolithic, music must have already existed in an advanced form for many thousands of years already; else it would have been impossible to construct something as technologically advanced as a flute that plays a particular scale. We may safely infer therefore that music is among the most ancient of human cognitive traits. Musical OriginsKnowing that music has ancient origins is important in establishing it as part of our original "human mental machinery," but it does not tell us why it may have developed. The answer to this question may always remain unknown, but for insight we may turn to Darwin. One of his most well-known comments about music, from The Descent of Man, is this one: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed" (2). Ten years later, in his autobiography, he reflected on and lamented his own musical anhedonia with these words: "...if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of hap...

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“…These studies have used tasks such as judging the relative height of the pitches of two lyrics in an imagined song (Zatorre, Halpern, Perry, Meyer, & Evans, 1996), imagining the continuation of a familiar melody given its opening notes (Halpern & Zatorre, 1999) or during gaps in an ongoing melody (Kraemer, Macrae, Green, & Kelley, 2005), and comparing the similarity of the timbres of two imagined instruments (Halpern, Zatorre, Bouffard, & Johnson, 2004). Auditory cortical involvement is also indicated by MEG data showing an early preattentive response to unexpected incorrect continuations of imagined melodies (Herholz, Lappe, Knief, & Pantev, 2008). Finally, the role of auditory cortex was supported by lesion data showing deficits in musical imagery following excision of right temporal cortex (Zatorre & Halpern, 1993).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Mental Reversal of Imagined Melodies: A Role for the Posterior Parietal Cortex

Zatorre

Halpern

Bouffard

2010

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

120

112

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Two fMRI experiments explored the neural substrates of a musical imagery task that required manipulation of the imagined sounds: temporal reversal of a melody. Musicians were presented with the first few notes of a familiar tune (Experiment 1) or its title (Experiment 2), followed by a string of notes that was either an exact or an inexact reversal. The task was to judge whether the second string was correct or not by mentally reversing all its notes, thus requiring both maintenance and manipulation of the represented string. Both experiments showed considerable activation of the superior parietal lobe (intraparietal sulcus) during the reversal process. Ventrolateral and dorsolateral frontal cortices were also activated, consistent with the memory load required during the task. We also found weaker evidence for some activation of right auditory cortex in both studies, congruent with results from previous simpler music imagery tasks. We interpret these results in the context of other mental transformation tasks, such as mental rotation in the visual domain, which are known to recruit the intraparietal sulcus region, and we propose that this region subserves general computations that require transformations of a sensory input. Mental imagery tasks may thus have both task or modality-specific components as well as components that supersede any specific codes and instead represent amodal mental manipulation.

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Neural basis of music imagery and the effect of musical expertise

Cited by 94 publications

References 70 publications

Differential parietal and temporal contributions to music perception in improvising and score-dependent musicians, an fMRI study

Differential parietal and temporal contributions to music perception in improvising and score-dependent musicians, an fMRI study

From perception to pleasure: Music and its neural substrates

Mental Reversal of Imagined Melodies: A Role for the Posterior Parietal Cortex

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