Inter-subject synchronization of brain responses during natural music listening
Corresponding Author
Daniel A. Abrams
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Correspondences: Dr Daniel A. Abrams and Dr Vinod Menon, 1Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, as above. E-mails: [email protected] and [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorSrikanth Ryali
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Search for more papers by this authorTianwen Chen
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Search for more papers by this authorParag Chordia
Department of Music, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Search for more papers by this authorAmirah Khouzam
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Search for more papers by this authorDaniel J. Levitin
Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Vinod Menon
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Program in Neuroscience, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA
Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA
Correspondences: Dr Daniel A. Abrams and Dr Vinod Menon, 1Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, as above. E-mails: [email protected] and [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Daniel A. Abrams
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Correspondences: Dr Daniel A. Abrams and Dr Vinod Menon, 1Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, as above. E-mails: [email protected] and [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorSrikanth Ryali
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Search for more papers by this authorTianwen Chen
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Search for more papers by this authorParag Chordia
Department of Music, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Search for more papers by this authorAmirah Khouzam
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Search for more papers by this authorDaniel J. Levitin
Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Vinod Menon
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94304 USA
Program in Neuroscience, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA
Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA
Correspondences: Dr Daniel A. Abrams and Dr Vinod Menon, 1Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, as above. E-mails: [email protected] and [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
Music is a cultural universal and a rich part of the human experience. However, little is known about common brain systems that support the processing and integration of extended, naturalistic ‘real-world’ music stimuli. We examined this question by presenting extended excerpts of symphonic music, and two pseudomusical stimuli in which the temporal and spectral structure of the Natural Music condition were disrupted, to non-musician participants undergoing functional brain imaging and analysing synchronized spatiotemporal activity patterns between listeners. We found that music synchronizes brain responses across listeners in bilateral auditory midbrain and thalamus, primary auditory and auditory association cortex, right-lateralized structures in frontal and parietal cortex, and motor planning regions of the brain. These effects were greater for natural music compared to the pseudo-musical control conditions. Remarkably, inter-subject synchronization in the inferior colliculus and medial geniculate nucleus was also greater for the natural music condition, indicating that synchronization at these early stages of auditory processing is not simply driven by spectro-temporal features of the stimulus. Increased synchronization during music listening was also evident in a right-hemisphere fronto-parietal attention network and bilateral cortical regions involved in motor planning. While these brain structures have previously been implicated in various aspects of musical processing, our results are the first to show that these regions track structural elements of a musical stimulus over extended time periods lasting minutes. Our results show that a hierarchical distributed network is synchronized between individuals during the processing of extended musical sequences, and provide new insight into the temporal integration of complex and biologically salient auditory sequences.
Supporting Information
| Filename | Description |
|---|---|
| ejn12173-sup-0001-FigS1-S2.docxWord document, 1.2 MB | Fig. S1. Differences between ISS and GLM approaches for the analysis of music processing in the brain. Fig. S2. Flow chart for ISS Analysis. Synchronization was calculated by computing Pearson correlations between the voxel time series in each pair of subjects (136 subject-to-subject comparisons total). |
| ejn12173-sup-0002-DataS1.docxWord document, 29.3 KB | Data S1. Methods. |
Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.
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