Cortical encoding of melodic expectations in human temporal cortex

Humans engagement in music rests on underlying elements such as the listeners’ cultural background and interest in music. These factors modulate how listeners anticipate musical events, a process inducing instantaneous neural responses as the music confronts these expectations. Measuring such neural correlates would represent a direct window into high-level brain processing. Here we recorded cortical signals as participants listened to Bach melodies. We assessed the relative contributions of acoustic versus melodic components of the music to the neural signal. Melodic features included information on pitch progressions and their tempo, which were extracted from a predictive model of musical structure based on Markov chains. We related the music to brain activity with temporal response functions demonstrating, for the first time, distinct cortical encoding of pitch and note-onset expectations during naturalistic music listening. This encoding was most pronounced at response latencies up to 350ms, and in both planum temporale and Heschl’s gyrus.

Methods
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--------------------------------------- DiliBach EEG dataset ---------------------------------------

Monophonic Bach music EEG Experiment from:

Di Liberto et al., Cortical encoding of melodic expectations in human temporal cortex, eLife, 2020

The EEG experiment was designed by Giovanni M. Di Liberto and Claire Pelofi

and conducted at the Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs, UMR 8248, CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure,

PSL University, France.

Data were collected by Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Claire Pelofi, and Gaelle Rouvier

(See below for the list of authors and affiliations)

Version 1.2: 24 June 2021 - Giovanni M. Di Liberto

--- CND data ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EEG signal was recorded as participants listened to monophonic piano Bach music.

Subjects 1-10 were non-musicians and 11-20 were expert pianists.

One Matlab (.mat) file for each subject. Each data file contains two variables: 'fs' (the sampling

frequency) and the EEG data.

--- Stimuli ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Original stimuli can be found on http://www.jsbach.net

and correspond to Bach violin pieces from sonatas and partitas, and partita for flute in A minor.

Audio files original filenames

audio1.mid - fp-1all.mid

audio2.mid - fp-2cou.mid

audio3.mid - fp-3sar.mid

audio4.mid - fp-4bou.mid

audio5.mid - vp2-1all.mid

audio6.mid - vs1-4prs.mid

audio7.mid - vp1-1al_v2.mid

audio8.mid - vp2-4gig_v2.mid

audio9.mid - vp3-2lou.mid

audio10.mid - vp3-3gav_v2.mid