Cortical activity during naturalistic music listening reflects short-range predictions based on long-term experience.

ABSTRACT: Expectations shape our experience of music. However, the internal model upon which listeners form melodic expectations is still debated. Do expectations stem from Gestalt-like principles or statistical learning? If the latter, does long-term experience play an important role, or are short-term regularities sufficient? And finally, what length of context informs contextual expectations? To answer these questions, we presented human listeners with diverse naturalistic compositions from Western classical music, while recording neural activity using MEG. We quantified note-level melodic surprise and uncertainty using various computational models of music, including a state-of-the-art transformer neural network. A time-resolved regression analysis revealed that neural activity over fronto-tempo

SUBMITTER: Kern P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9836393 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature