Experiencing music as a listener, performer, or a composer is an active process that engages perceptual and cognitive faculties, endowing the experience with memories, joy, and emotion. Through this active auditory engagement, humans analyze and comprehend complex musical scenes by invoking its cultural norms, segregating sound mixtures, and marshaling expectations and anticipation. These remarkable feats are beyond our understanding and far exceed the capabilities of the most sophisticated music analysis systems. The goal of the research is to investigate how cortical neuroplasticity in humans and animal models shapes musical perception and experience over multiple time-scales. We also explore how musical norms and scales are assimilated through long-term exposure, and how auditory-motor associations rapidly form during performance and listening to music and rhythms. The research exploits neuroscience and computational approaches developed to study the cortical processing of language and speech. It will harness the power of these ideas and techniques to delineate the role of cognitive functions and adaptive sensory processing in forming musical structure and perception. The project builds upon findings in the fields of auditory cognition, cortical physiology, and computational neuroscience.
The societal benefits of the project are extensive and varied. The resulting information from the project will reveal basic mechanisms of neuroscience, how a healthy brain interacts with the culture that shapes it and enriches the life of the individual.
The overall scientific aim of the project is to investigate the neuroscience of music with experimental and theoretical approaches that complement and augment existing fMRI and clinical studies. The proposed approach is grounded in the view that learning music entails acquiring abstractions of the environment (culture and knowledge), and ways to interact with it (skills). This process is remarkably versatile, taking explicit and implicit forms, and having many time-scales (rapid or developmental). The psychoacoustic/EEG experiments described below test various manifestations of these two forms. For the first half o this project, the overall objectives were to explore the perception of musical learning in psychoacoustic experiments and EEG recordings. We therefore recruited the necessary expertise both to record high-resolution spatiotemporal EEG responses to music in behaving humans, and to frame the proposed experiments in a musical context by garnering insights from music theory, performance, and composition. These diverse approaches provided new insights into brain function.
