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

The general aim of this experiment was to investigate the processes involved in reading musical notation and to study the relationship between written music and its auditory representation. It was of main interest to determine whether musicians are able to develop expectancies for specific tonal or atonal auditory events based on visual score alone. Can musicians expect an atonal event or will it always sound odd? Moreover, it was of interest to determine whether the modulations in amplitude of a late positive component (P600) described in previous studies are linked to a general mismatch detection process or to specific musical expectancies. Results showed clearly that musicians are able to expect tonal auditory endings based on visual information and are also able to do so for atonal endings, although to a smaller extent. Strong interactions seem to exist between visual and auditory musical codes and visual information seems to influence auditory processing as early as 100 msec. These results are directly relevant for the question of whether music reading is actually music perception.

[1]  R. Zatorre,et al.  When that tune runs through your head: a PET investigation of auditory imagery for familiar melodies. , 1999, Cerebral cortex.

[2]  J. Sloboda,et al.  Visual Perception of Musical Notation: Registering Pitch Symbols in Memory , 1976, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[3]  G. Denes,et al.  Naming of Musical Notes: A Selective Deficit in One Musical Clef , 2001, Cortex.

[4]  R. Sekuler,et al.  Sound alters visual motion perception , 1997, Nature.

[5]  A. Halpern.  Musical expertise and melodic structure in memory for musical notation. , 1982 .

[6]  T. Gunter,et al.  Music matters: preattentive musicality of the human brain. , 2002, Psychophysiology.

[7]  M. Besson,et al.  AN EVENT-RELATED POTENTIAL (ERP) STUDY OF MUSICAL EXPECTANCY : COMPARISON OF MUSICIANS WITH NONMUSICIANS , 1995 .

[8]  K. Kaga,et al.  Auditory imagery mismatch negativity elicited in musicians , 2005, Neuroreport.

[9]  A. Friederici,et al.  Differentiating ERAN and MMN: An ERP study , 2001, Neuroreport.

[10]  T. Gunter,et al.  Let's face the music: a behavioral and electrophysiological exploration of score reading. , 2003, Psychophysiology.

[11]  F. Macar,et al.  An event-related potential analysis of incongruity in music and other non-linguistic contexts. , 1987, Psychophysiology.

[12]  D. Schön,et al.  Processing pitch and duration in music reading: a RT–ERP study , 2002, Neuropsychologia.

[13]  Aniruddh D. Patel,et al.  Processing Syntactic Relations in Language and Music: An Event-Related Potential Study , 1998, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[14]  I. Peretz,et al.  Musical scale properties are automatically processed in the human auditory cortex , 2006, Brain Research.

[15]  Auditory cortex responds in 100 ms to incongruity of melody , 2000, Neuroreport.

[16]  T. Elbert,et al.  Specific tonotopic organizations of different areas of the human auditory cortex revealed by simultaneous magnetic and electric recordings. , 1995, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[17]  Riitta Hari,et al.  Mind's Ear in a Musician: Where and When in the Brain , 2002, NeuroImage.

[18]  John A. Sloboda,et al.  Experimental Studies of Music Reading: A Review , 1984 .

[19]  Ray Jackendoff,et al.  Musical Parsing and Musical Affect , 1991 .

[20]  E Altenmüller,et al.  Cross‐modal plasticity of the motor cortex while listening to a rehearsed musical piece , 2006, The European journal of neuroscience.

[21]  H. McGurk,et al.  Hearing lips and seeing voices , 1976, Nature.

[22]  A. Friederici,et al.  Brain Indices of Music Processing: Nonmusicians are Musical , 2000, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[23]  J M Badier,et al.  Evoked potentials recorded from the auditory cortex in man: evaluation and topography of the middle latency components. , 1994, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[24]  D Schön,et al.  Comparison between Language and Music , 2001, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[25]  J. Sloboda.  The Psychology of Music Reading , 1978 .

[26]  H G Vaughan,et al.  The scalp topography of potentials in auditory and visual Go/NoGo tasks. , 1977, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[27]  M. Besson,et al.  Different Brain Mechanisms Mediate Sensitivity to Sensory Consonance and Harmonic Context: Evidence from Auditory Event-Related Brain Potentials , 2001, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[28]  A. Friederici,et al.  Musical syntax is processed in Broca's area: an MEG study , 2001, Nature Neuroscience.

[29]  D. Schön,et al.  The music of speech: music training facilitates pitch processing in both music and language. , 2004, Psychophysiology.