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.