On the neural correlates of music perception:

Music is found universally across human cultures and there is evidence that the ability to appreciate music develops even without explicit training (Trehub, 2003). Like speech, music is a system in which perceptually distinct elements are organized into hierarchically structured sequences according to syntactic principles (as discussed in the work of Lerdhal and Jackendoff), but despite the similarities with language, music perception also involves the processing of complex rhythm, pitch and tension patterns which are unique to this system and which make it incredibly intricate and fascinating. If sound perception in general triggers brain activation in distinct cortical regions, which last a few milliseconds, music cognition requires seconds for a musical phrase to be fully developed; first the primitives of music have to be identified, then they must be integrated within the unfolding musical context. This complexity is reflected in the different brain responses that are observable while someone is listening to music: activations which reveal the fine temporal structure of the stimulus coexist with activations whose dynamics follow the global development of the composition. The current literature on the brain activity during music perception has focused, from what I can tell, on musical syntactic processing and on rhythm, in a fashion which is in my opinion very much influenced by the work that has been done in studies on language. If on one hand this allowed for fruitful comparisons between the two systems, on the other hand, the stimulus material was made very "sentence-like" and it therefore missed some crucial characteristics of real music. Very often stimuli consisted of short segments or fragments of musical pieces, which had been specifically composed or selected for the experiment. Expressive modulation of movements and dynamic aspects of an authentic musical piece where disregarded in the analysis, even though they are crucial to the perception of music. Among all possible topics of interest in the domain of music perception, what most intrigued was the process of segmentation of the complex auditory signal into coherent units which go from being very small, to very complicated, as higher level representations are formed. I have collected three papers which look at different levels of music perception, from rhythm, to phrases and to movements. The imaging methods used in these works are appropriate for the specific level of interest: neural correlates of rhythms, which demands fine temporal resolution were explored using MEG, the perception of phrase structure …