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 ...人类对音乐的参与行为植根于诸多底层要素，例如聆听者的文化背景与音乐兴趣。此类因素会调节聆听者对音乐事件的预期模式，而当音乐与这些预期相互作用时，该过程会诱发即时神经响应。对这类神经关联物的测量，将成为窥探高级大脑认知加工过程的直接窗口。本研究在受试者聆听巴赫旋律时采集了其皮层信号，并评估了音乐的声学成分与旋律成分分别对神经信号的相对贡献度。旋律特征包含音高走向及其节奏速率相关信息，这些信息源自基于马尔可夫链（Markov Chains）构建的音乐结构预测模型。我们借助时间响应函数（Temporal Response Functions）将音乐信号与大脑活动相关联，首次证实了在自然音乐聆听过程中，大脑皮层会分别对音高预期与音符起始点预期进行差异化编码。该编码在响应潜伏期不超过……时最为显著。