Musical training shapes neural responses to melodic and prosodic expectation

The association between liking, learning and creativity in music

Aesthetic preference is intricately linked to learning and creativity. Previous studies have largely examined the perception of novelty in terms of pleasantness and the generation of novelty via creativity separately. The current study examines the connection between perception and generation of novelty in music; specifically, we investigated how pleasantness judgements and brain responses to musical notes of varying probability (estimated by a computational model of auditory expectation) are linked to learning and creativity. To facilitate learning de novo, 40 non-musicians were trained on an unfamiliar artificial music grammar. After learning, participants evaluated the pleasantness of the final notes of melodies, which varied in probability, while their EEG was recorded. They also composed their own musical pieces using the learned grammar which were subsequently assessed by experts. As expected, there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between liking and probability: participants were more likely to rate the notes with intermediate probabilities as pleasant. Further, intermediate probability notes elicited larger N100 and P200 at posterior and frontal sites, respectively, associated with prediction error processing. Crucially, individuals who produced less creative compositions preferred higher probability notes, whereas individuals who composed more creative pieces preferred notes with intermediate probability. Finally, evoked brain responses to note probability were relatively independent of learning and creativity, suggesting that these higher-level processes are not mediated by brain responses related to performance monitoring. Overall, our findings shed light on the relationship between perception and generation of novelty, offering new insights into aesthetic preference and its neural correlates.

Musical training alters neural processing of tones and vowels in classic Chinese poems

Long-term rigorous musical training promotes various aspects of spoken language processing. However, it is unclear whether musical training provides an advantage in recognizing segmental and suprasegmental information of spoken language. We used vowel and tone violations in spoken unfamiliar seven-character quatrains and a rhyming judgment task to investigate the effects of musical training on tone and vowel processing by recording ERPs. Compared with non-musicians, musicians were more accurate and responded faster to incorrect than correct tones. Musicians showed larger P2 components in their ERPs than non-musicians during both tone and vowel processing, revealing increased focused attention on sounds. Both groups showed enhanced N400 and LPC for incorrect vowels (vs. correct vowels) but non-musicians showed an additional P2 effect for vowel violations. Moreover, both groups showed enhanced LPC for incorrect tones (vs. correct tones) but only non-musicians showed an additional N400 effect for tone violations. These results indicate that vowel/tone processing is less effortful for musicians (vs. non-musicians). Our study suggests that long-term musical training facilitates speech tone and vowel processing in a tonal language environment by increasing the attentional focus on speech and reducing demands for detecting incorrect vowels and integration costs for tone changes.

Exploring individual differences in musical rhythm and grammar skills in school-aged children with typically developing language

A growing number of studies have shown a connection between rhythmic processing and language skill. It has been proposed that domain-general rhythm abilities might help children to tap into the rhythm of speech (prosody), cueing them to prosodic markers of grammatical (syntactic) information during language acquisition, thus underlying the observed correlations between rhythm and language. Working memory processes common to task demands for musical rhythm discrimination and spoken language paradigms are another possible source of individual variance observed in musical rhythm and language abilities. To investigate the nature of the relationship between musical rhythm and expressive grammar skills, we adopted an individual differences approach in N = 132 elementary school-aged children ages 5-7, with typical language development, and investigated prosodic perception and working memory skills as possible mediators. Aligning with the literature, musical rhythm was correlated with expressive grammar performance (r = 0.41, p < 0.001). Moreover, musical rhythm predicted mastery of complex syntax items (r = 0.26, p = 0.003), suggesting a privileged role of hierarchical processing shared between musical rhythm processing and children's acquisition of complex syntactic structures. These relationships between rhythm and grammatical skills were not mediated by prosodic perception, working memory, or non-verbal IQ; instead, we uncovered a robust direct effect of musical rhythm perception on grammatical task performance. Future work should focus on possible biological endophenotypes and genetic influences underlying this relationship.

Temporal hierarchies in the predictive processing of melody - From pure tones to songs

Listening to musical melodies is a complex task that engages perceptual and memoryrelated processes. The processes underlying melody cognition happen simultaneously on different timescales, ranging from milliseconds to minutes. Although attempts have been made, research on melody perception is yet to produce a unified framework of how melody processing is achieved in the brain. This may in part be due to the difficulty of integrating concepts such as perception, attention and memory, which pertain to different temporal scales. Recent theories on brain processing, which hold prediction as a fundamental principle, offer potential solutions to this problem and may provide a unifying framework for explaining the neural processes that enable melody perception on multiple temporal levels. In this article, we review empirical evidence for predictive coding on the levels of pitch formation, basic pitch-related auditory patterns,more complex regularity processing extracted from basic patterns and long-term expectations related to musical syntax. We also identify areas that would benefit from further inquiry and suggest future directions in research on musical melody perception.

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings.  These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects and failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Duration) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 59 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings.  These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects and failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Duration) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 59 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

The German Music@Home: Validation of a questionnaire measuring at home musical exposure and interaction of young children

The present study introduces the German version of the original version of the Music@Home questionnaire developed in the UK, which systematically evaluates musical engagement in the home environment of young children. Two versions are available, an Infant version for children aged three to 23 months and a Preschool version for children aged two to five and a half years. For the present study, the original Music@Home questionnaire was translated from English into German and 656 caregivers completed the questionnaire online. A confirmatory factor analysis showed moderate to high fit indices for both versions, confirming the factor structure of the original questionnaire. Also, the reliability coefficients for the subscales (Parental beliefs, Child engagement with music, Parent initiation of singing, Parent initiation of music-making for the Infant version and Parental beliefs, Child engagement with music, Parent initiation of music behavior and Breadth of musical exposure for the Preschool version) ranged from moderate to high fits. Furthermore, the test-retest analysis (N = 392) revealed high correlations for the general factor and all subscales confirming their internal reliability. Additionally, we included language questionnaires for children of two and three years of age. Results showed that higher scores on the Music@Home questionnaire were moderately associated with better language skills in two-year-olds (N = 118). In sum, the study presents the validated German Music@Home questionnaire, which shows good psychometric properties. The two versions of the questionnaire are available for use in order to assess home musical engagement of young children, which could be of interest in many areas of developmental research.

Decision Making Strategy and the Simultaneous Processing of Syntactic Dependencies in Language and Music

Despite differences in their function and domain-specific elements, syntactic processing in music and language is believed to share cognitive resources. This study aims to investigate whether the simultaneous processing of language and music share the use of a common syntactic processor or more general attentional resources. To investigate this matter we tested musicians and non-musicians using visually presented sentences and aurally presented melodies containing syntactic local and long-distance dependencies. Accuracy rates and reaction times of participants' responses were collected. In both sentences and melodies, unexpected syntactic anomalies were introduced. This is the first study to address the processing of local and long-distance dependencies in language and music combined while reducing the effect of sensory memory. Participants were instructed to focus on language (language session), music (music session), or both (dual session). In the language session, musicians and non-musicians performed comparably in terms of accuracy rates and reaction times. As expected, groups' differences appeared in the music session, with musicians being more accurate in their responses than non-musicians and only the latter showing an interaction between the accuracy rates for music and language syntax. In the dual session musicians were overall more accurate than non-musicians. However, both groups showed comparable behavior, by displaying an interaction between the accuracy rates for language and music syntax responses. In our study, accuracy rates seem to better capture the interaction between language and music syntax; and this interaction seems to indicate the use of distinct, however, interacting mechanisms as part of decision making strategy. This interaction seems to be subject of an increase of attentional load and domain proficiency. Our study contributes to the long-lasting debate about the commonalities between language and music by providing evidence for their interaction at a more domain-general level.

Not Cure But Heal: Music and Medicine

Do you know that our soul is composed of harmony? Leonardo Da Vinci Despite evidence for music-specific mechanisms at the level of pitch-pattern representations, the most fascinating aspect of music is its transmodality. Recent psychological and neuroscientific evidence suggest that music is unique in the coupling of perception, cognition, action and emotion. This potentially explains why music has been since time immemorial almost inextricably linked to healing processes and should continue to be.