HENRY

A study in NeuroImage suggests that language and music are processed by the same underlying brain systems. Using EEG (which has really good temporal sensitivity), the authors presented subjects with melodies that were violated in one of three ways:

1) Rule-only violations: where the melody contained out-of-key deviant notes that violated the tonal harmony rules in melodies that were unfamiliar to the listener.
2) Memory-only violations: where the melody contained notes that followed musical rules, but deviated from the actual melody known to the listener.
3) Both memory and rule violations: the notes in the melody violated both musical rules and memory.

The results of this study show a double-dissociation between the rule violations and the memory violations where both the rule violation conditions (1 & 3) but not the memory-only condition (2) caused an early negative event-related potential (ERP), localised to the anterior central right hemisphere.

This is strikingly similar to the “N400” ERP which is seen when subjects are presented with rule-based violations of linguistic stimuli (e.g. “I like my coffee with cream and dog“), which suggests that music and language are both subserved by similar processing systems.

The full paper will be out later in the year: Double dissociation between rules and memory in music: An event-related potential study, but until then, ScienceDaily has a brief write-up.

Posted on September 27th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill