Brain waves associated with musical incongruities differ for musicians and non-musicians

Musicians and non-musicians were presented with short musical phrases that were either selected from the classical musical repertoire or composed for the experiment. The phrases terminated either in a congruous or a 'harmonically', 'melodically', or 'rhythmically' incongruous note. The brain waves produced by the end-notes differed greatly between musicians and non-musicians, and as a function of the subject's familiarity with the melodies and the type of incongruity. The timing of these brain waves revealed that musicians are faster than non-musicians in detecting incongruities. This study provides further neurophysiological evidence concerning the mechanisms underlying music perception and the differences between musical and linguistic processing.

[1]  M. Kutas,et al.  Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association , 1984, Nature.

[2]  R. Zatorre.  Recognition of dichotic melodies by musicians and nonmusicians , 1978, Neuropsychologia.

[3]  W. Jay Dowling,et al.  Recognition of transposed melodies: a key-distance effect in developmental perspective. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[4]  T. Bever,et al.  Cerebral Dominance in Musicians and Nonmusicians , 1974, Science.

[5]  Ray Jackendoff,et al.  A Grammatical Parallel between Music and Language , 1982 .

[6]  T G Bever,et al.  Harmonic structure as a determinant of melodic organization , 1981, Memory & cognition.

[7]  M. Kutas,et al.  Reading senseless sentences: brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. , 1980, Science.

[8]  W. Dowling.  Scale and contour: Two components of a theory of memory for melodies. , 1978 .

[9]  H. Neville,et al.  Language and , 2019, Adventure Diffusion.

[10]  S. Farmer,et al.  The effects of physical and semantic incongruities on auditory event-related potentials. , 1984, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[11]  E. Donchin,et al.  COGNITIVE PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY: THE ENDOGENOUS COMPONENTS OF THE ERP , 1978 .

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

[13]  M. Kutas,et al.  Event-related potential asymmetries during the reading of sentences. , 1988, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[14]  M. Kutas.  Event related brain potential studies of language , 1988 .

[15]  A R Halpern,et al.  Perception of structure in novel music , 1984, Memory & cognition.

[16]  J. Jenkins,et al.  The abstraction of musical ideas , 1982, Memory & cognition.

[17]  J Sergent,et al.  Distributed neural network underlying musical sight-reading and keyboard performance. , 1992, Science.

[18]  R. Johnson.  A triarchic model of P300 amplitude. , 1986, Psychophysiology.

[19]  Ray Johnson.  For Distinguished Early Career Contribution to Psychophysiology: Award Address, 1985 , 1986 .

[20]  P. H. Lindsay,et al.  Evoked Potential Correlates of Auditory Signal Detection , 1971, Science.

[21]  F. Keil,et al.  Acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal functions in music , 1982, Memory & cognition.

[22]  C C Wood,et al.  Event-related potentials elicited by deviant endings to melodies. , 1992, Psychophysiology.

[23]  R Verleger,et al.  P3-evoking wrong notes: unexpected, awaited, or arousing? , 1990, The International journal of neuroscience.