The neural underpinnings of music listening under different attention conditions

Abstract

Most studies examining the neural underpinnings of music listening have no specific instruction on how to process the presented musical pieces. In this study, we explicitly manipulated the participants' focus of attention while they listened to the musical pieces. We used an ecologically valid experimental setting by presenting the musical stimuli simultaneously with naturalistic film sequences. In one condition, the participants were instructed to focus their attention on the musical piece (attentive listening), whereas in the second condition, the participants directed their attention to the film sequence (passive listening). We used two instrumental musical pieces: an electronic pop song, which was a major hit at the time of testing, and a classical musical piece. During music presentation, we measured electroencephalographic oscillations and responses from the autonomic nervous system (heart rate and high-frequency heart rate variability). During passive listening to the pop song, we found strong event-related synchronizations in all analyzed frequency bands (theta, lower alpha, upper alpha, lower beta, and upper beta). The neurophysiological responses during attentive listening to the pop song were similar to those of the classical musical piece during both listening conditions. Thus, the focus of attention had a strong influence on the neurophysiological responses to the pop song, but not on the responses to the classical musical piece. The electroencephalographic responses during passive listening to the pop song are interpreted as a neurophysiological and psychological state typically observed when the participants are 'drawn into the music'.

A Preliminary Study of the Effects of Attentive Music Listening on Cochlear Implant Users’ Speech Perception, Quality of Life, and Behavioral and Objective Measures of Frequency Change Detection

“…The attentive music listening program used for training in the current study is different from passive listening to the music one might do in daily life (e.g., doing irrelevant tasks during listening). Neurophysiological studies have reported different brain activations between attentive and passive listening conditions with music materials (Jancke et al, 2018). The differences between passive vs. attentive listening can also be seen in the cortical responses to an oddball paradigm that consists of rarely presented stimuli (deviants) and frequently presented stimuli (standard stimuli).…”

Suppressing the Chills: Effects of Musical Manipulation on the Chills Response

“…However behavioral data from some participants suggest that some listeners used continuous measurements as indicators of general emotional intensity instead; although there is little known about individual thresholds of recognizing chills experiences, some continuous data are consistently reflecting some form of experience, and it is highly unlikely that these listeners are experiencing chills throughout the course of the piece. Furthermore, concurrent tasks during music listening may affect the affective experience (Markovic et al, 2017 ; Jäncke et al, 2018 ), although there are some inconsistent results (Hutcherson et al, 2005 ). Regardless, the continuous measurement task was highly simplified, and whilst some emotional intensity may have been lost, the stimuli remained effective elicitors of chills, and the current results and effects of manipulation were clear.…”

“…For these continuous measurements, data were collected with an analog slider, moved upwards to indicate higher levels of chills intensity, or vice-versa; slider movement changed amplitude values of a monitored and recorded sine wave, which was preferred over a rating scale, as it was deemed to be less distracting, and a simpler task. It was important to keep this task as simple as possible, as concurrent tasks during listening may have the capacity to affect physiological and emotional responses (Jäncke et al, 2018 ). Chills are normally reported by participants, either by raising their hand to indicate the response (Panksepp, 1995 ; Craig, 2005 ) or by pressing a button (Grewe et al, 2007 ; Salimpoor et al, 2009 ).…”

Exploring Frequency-Dependent Brain Networks from Ongoing EEG Using Spatial ICA During Music Listening

“…They found the theta and alpha oscillations along central and occipital area of scalp topology seems significantly associated with high-level (tonal and rhythmical) acoustic features processing. Also, many other studies tried to examine the neural underpinnings of music listening based on sensorlevel EEG data (Jäncke et al 2015(Jäncke et al , 2018Markovic et al 2017), in which different frequency bands were extracted using time-frequency analysis methods and further analyzed separately (e.g., event-related synchronizations and oscillatory power changes). Those studies showed the influence of different music listening styles on neurophysiological and psychological state interpreted by brain activation.…”