Modeling Tonal Structure in Music: From Theory to Behavior and Brain Function

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Western tonal music is based on major and minor keys. When people listen to Western music over many years, they acquire an implicit understanding of how the keys are related to each other. This allows listeners to detect "wrong notes" or to perceive a sense of tension in the music. The relationships of the keys to one another, something called tonal space, can be described by their relative position on a torus (a donut-shaped geometrical space). The model developed in this proposal provides quantitative descriptions of how music moves on the torus of tonal space and how our expectations concerning that movement effect our behavioral, emotional, and neural responses. When the model predicts that a particular note or chord is unexpected, will it be perceived as an unexpected or "wrong' note? The proposed work will also explore the timescales over which tonal expectations are structured. Is the model-predicted brain activity that follows music's movements in tonal space the same as the brain circuitry actually engaged when memories are evoked by music?The broader significance of this research lies in relating structural aspects of music to specific psychological and neural processes that underlie our ability to perceive, appreciate, and respond to music. The model that is being developed is centered on the concept of expectation. Whether the sensory input that the world provides matches our expectations is emerging as a general principle for how our brains function. By examining how expectations operate in the brain in association with music, an extremely powerful and compelling source of stimulation for humans, the investigators hope to gain more general insight into the functional organization of the human brain.