Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NEUME (Neuroplasticity and the Musical Experience)
Période du rapport: 2021-10-01 au 2023-03-31
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.
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.
Project has achieved considerable progress during this period, with major efforts initiated (and some completed) in four different directions:
(1) How music exposure and knowledge can be explored during listening. This project developed models of musical memory, and then tested them with EEG and ECoG recordings with human subjects. The project thus far has resulted in two publications.
(2) Musical imagination. This project is underway and all data collection is completed, and the detailed analyses of the results and a paper is under preparation. The key achievement thus far is our ability to decode imagined music and to demonstrate that it shares much with real listening.
(3) The Neural bases of musical engagement. This project seeks to develop an objective method to assess the engagement of listeners with music, and to use this method to understand the neural bases of these engagements. Data collection is complete and a paper is under preparation of the results.
(4) Musical enculturation. This project focuses on how exploring how quick is musical acquisition, and the manner in which acquired music is integrated with pre-existing musical culture. Project is midway through with partially completed data collection thus far.
(1) How music exposure and knowledge can be explored during listening. This project developed models of musical memory, and then tested them with EEG and ECoG recordings with human subjects. The project thus far has resulted in two publications.
(2) Musical imagination. This project is underway and all data collection is completed, and the detailed analyses of the results and a paper is under preparation. The key achievement thus far is our ability to decode imagined music and to demonstrate that it shares much with real listening.
(3) The Neural bases of musical engagement. This project seeks to develop an objective method to assess the engagement of listeners with music, and to use this method to understand the neural bases of these engagements. Data collection is complete and a paper is under preparation of the results.
(4) Musical enculturation. This project focuses on how exploring how quick is musical acquisition, and the manner in which acquired music is integrated with pre-existing musical culture. Project is midway through with partially completed data collection thus far.
There were numerous findings that were new and provided the bases for the publications that have been accepted or already published. These are summarized as follows:
1. Explorations of how sensory and motor interactions take place as during playing of musical instruments or speaking. This involved analyses of data recording in humans and included computational models of the learning. A publication that already appeared in Cerebral Cortex Communications this year. Much future extensions of this work are underway, which include more human experiments, as well as animal based experiments to record the sensorimotor interactions during exposure and learning to play sounds.
2. Enculturation with music. We have shown that enculturation is a strongly measurable phenomenon that can be tested with music in human listeners. A publication to summarize the results contrasting Western and Chinese music listeners is under preparation. Another publication that is based on ultrasound measurements has been accepted in the journal eLife. For the remainder of the grant period, we plan to expose animals to music (Bach Chorals) and test for the “enculturation” in their brains. Much as was done in humans. We strongly believe that the mechanisms involved are basic enough to exist in animals. We are going to enlarge this project to test for exposure and encoding of animal vocalizations in ferret auditory cortical areas using large scale functional ultrasound recordings.
3. Key new findings on the way imagination of music is encoded in the brain have resulted in two publications in the journal of neuroscience. These findings are completely new and help provide new interpretations on how imagination plays a key role in creation and perception.
1. Explorations of how sensory and motor interactions take place as during playing of musical instruments or speaking. This involved analyses of data recording in humans and included computational models of the learning. A publication that already appeared in Cerebral Cortex Communications this year. Much future extensions of this work are underway, which include more human experiments, as well as animal based experiments to record the sensorimotor interactions during exposure and learning to play sounds.
2. Enculturation with music. We have shown that enculturation is a strongly measurable phenomenon that can be tested with music in human listeners. A publication to summarize the results contrasting Western and Chinese music listeners is under preparation. Another publication that is based on ultrasound measurements has been accepted in the journal eLife. For the remainder of the grant period, we plan to expose animals to music (Bach Chorals) and test for the “enculturation” in their brains. Much as was done in humans. We strongly believe that the mechanisms involved are basic enough to exist in animals. We are going to enlarge this project to test for exposure and encoding of animal vocalizations in ferret auditory cortical areas using large scale functional ultrasound recordings.
3. Key new findings on the way imagination of music is encoded in the brain have resulted in two publications in the journal of neuroscience. These findings are completely new and help provide new interpretations on how imagination plays a key role in creation and perception.