Investigating brain responses to section endings in tonal, classical and rhythmic music : an fMRI study

Abstract

Our overall aim was to examine brain responses to different experiences of time in music with a particular focus on the question of how we experience large-scale music form. The present experiment was aimed at investigating the neural correlates to experiencing section endings in teleological (goal-directed) music as well as in rhythmic (groove-based) music. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 14 human participants. Comparing transition points to continuous sections of the music we found that there was more neural activity in both musical genres at the transition points. Additionally we saw stronger blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) fMRI activations at transition points in the rhythmical piece than in the classical piece. We did four region-of-interest (ROI) analyses, based on a priori expectations about the likely involvement of different brain areas in our task; the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), the posterior temporal cortex (PTC), the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the posterior parietal cortex (PPC). PTC was the only region that showed activations strong enough to survive the correction for multiple comparisons.