Neural Correlates of Familiarity in Music Listening: A Systematic Review and a Neuroimaging Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Familiarity in music has been reported as an important factor modulating emotional and hedonic responses in the brain. Familiarity and repetition may increase the liking of a piece of music, thus inducing positive emotions. Neuroimaging studies have focused on identifying the brain regions involved in the processing of familiar and unfamiliar musical stimuli. However, the use of different modalities and experimental designs has led to discrepant results and it is not clear which areas of the brain are most reliably engaged when listening to familiar and unfamiliar musical excerpts. In the present study, we conducted a systematic review from three databases (Medline, PsychoINFO, and Embase) using the keywords (recognition OR familiar OR familiarity OR exposure effect OR repetition) AND (music OR song) AND (brain OR brains OR neuroimaging OR functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging OR Position Emission Tomography OR Electroencephalography OR Event Related Potential OR Magnetoencephalography). Of the 704 titles identified, 23 neuroimaging studies met our inclusion criteria for the systematic review. After removing studies providing insufficient information or contrasts, 11 studies (involving 212 participants) qualified for the meta-analysis using the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach. Our results did not find significant peak activations consistently across included studies. Using a less conservative approach (p < 0.001, uncorrected for multiple comparisons) we found that the left superior frontal gyrus, the ventral lateral (VL) nucleus of the left thalamus, and the left medial surface of the superior frontal gyrus had the highest likelihood of being activated by familiar music. On the other hand, the left insula, and the right anterior cingulate cortex had the highest likelihood of being activated by unfamiliar music. We had expected limbic structures as top clusters when listening to familiar music. But, instead, music familiarity had a motor pattern of activation. This could reflect an audio-motor synchronization to the rhythm which is more engaging for familiar tunes, and/or a sing-along response in one's mind, anticipating melodic, harmonic progressions, rhythms, timbres, and lyric events in the familiar songs. These data provide evidence for the need for larger neuroimaging studies to understand the neural correlates of music familiarity.

Sweet anticipation: Predictability of familiar music in autism

“…The left hippocampus, present in the key network in this study, has been found to be related to retrieval success for music memory (Gagnepain et al, 2017;Watanabe, Yagishita, & Kikyo, 2008) and to be involved in coding expectancy violations that are caused by reward anticipation (Gebauer et al, 2012;Salimpoor, Zald, Zatorre, Dagher, & McIntosh, 2015). The left hippocampus and temporal pole have been found to be active in familiar music listening contrasted to non-familiar music listening (Freitas et al, 2018;Pereira et al, 2011;Plailly et al, 2007).…”

“…The amygdala is a crucial hub involved in many network configurations, and has been implicated in functions ranging from establishing valence or salience, cognition, reward, and social learning (Rutishauser, Mamelak, & Adolphs, 2015). Amygdala activations have previously been found in emotional responses to musical stimuli, namely in listening to familiar music (Freitas et al, 2018;Koelsch, Fritz, v. Cramon, Müller, & Friederici, 2006;Pereira et al, 2011), and in violation of musical expectancies (Gebauer et al, 2012;Koelsch, Fritz, & Schlaug, 2008).…”

“…All regions in the aforementioned network thus appear to be involved in the processing of familiar music specifically (Freitas et al, 2018;Pereira et al, 2011), be it associating the sensory information to emotional responses, familiar music recall or establishing salience (a process highly dependent upon memory). The reason why this key network may have lower probability of occurrence in autistic listeners may be due to differences in predictive processing.…”

Preservation of Musical Memory Throughout the Progression of Alzheimer’s Disease? Toward a Reconciliation of Theoretical, Clinical, and Neuroimaging Evidence

“…An important literature exists concerning the exploration of musical cognition [18,[70][71][72][73][74] with neuroimaging methods. However, experimental works specifically focusing on musical memory are much scarcer [75][76][77] and mainly done in healthy subjects. We emphasize the complementary results of four neuroimaging studies allowing assumptions on the underlying cerebral substrates organization of episodic and semantic memories and verbal and musical memories and their dissociations.…”

Reorganization of the neurobiology of language after sentence overlearning

“…For example, in both monkeys and humans, learning to play sounds on a keyboard is subsequently associated with specific activation of sensorimotor regions involved in making finger and hand movements when listening to those sounds [80][81][82][83][84][85] . More generally, musical training improves sound and speech perception and these improvements are typically associated with sensorimotor regions [85][86][87][88][89][90] . Similarly, learning new speech sounds, novel words and artificial languages are all associated with more sensorimotor activity during perception following learning and consolidation 79,[91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99] .…”