Elsevier

Cognitive Brain Research

Volume 12, Issue 1, August 2001, Pages 101-108
Cognitive Brain Research

Research report
Activated brain regions in musicians during an ensemble: a PET study

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0926-6410(01)00044-1Get rights and content

Abstract

As in visual processing, we speculated that, in music processing, different brain regions would activate according to the mode of music listening. Using motets by a famous composer, we studied changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) with positron emission tomography associated with concentrating on the alto-part within the harmony (alto-part-listening condition) compared to listening to the harmony as a whole (harmony-listening condition). The alto-part-listening condition was associated with bilateral increases of rCBF in superior parietal lobules, precunei, premotor areas and orbital frontal cortices. Superior parietal lobules are likely to be responsible for auditory selective attention to the alto part within the harmony and the analysis of tone pitch on a mental score. The precuneus possibly participated in writing tones of the alto part on a mental score. Based on our findings, we propose that both auditory selective attention and analytic processing play an important role in concentrating on a certain vocal part within a harmony. During the harmony-listening condition, temporal poles, the anterior portion of the cingulate gyrus, occipital cortex and the medial surface of the cerebellum were bilaterally activated. Further studies are necessary to clarify the difference in music processing between musicians and nonmusicians.

Introduction

In visual processing, it has been reported that brain regions activate selectively depending on whether the subject views an object with globally or locally directed attention [9], [10]. This difference in regions of activation between global and local visual processing is also supported by lesion-studies [24]. In music processing, professional musicians utilize two modes of listening to music, namely globally or locally directed attention. When professional musicians listen to music, they sometimes listen to the sound of harmony as a whole and sometimes only to a certain vocal or instrumental part within the harmony. These two modes of listening to music also function during an ensemble, typically in harmonious music. When only one player is performing a melody with harmonious accompaniment, i.e., a solo, in an ensemble, the player listens to the sound of harmony as a whole and emits his or her tones appropriately for keeping in harmony with the accompaniment. Whereas, when several players are performing an identical melody simultaneously with the harmonious accompaniment, i.e., soli, during an ensemble, professional musicians listen to and concentrate on the identical melody for the purpose of making their tones sound as if only one player were performing that melody. In order to clarify whether different regions of the brain are activated depending on the mode of listening as the results of global/local visual processing, we examined music students while they concentrated on a certain vocal part and listened to the harmony as a whole for the same piece of music. We compared the activated regions of the former condition with those of the latter condition, using the subtraction technique for positron emission tomography (PET).

Section snippets

Subjects

Nine right-handed male volunteers (age range 21–28 years, mean 21.8 years) participated in the study. All subjects were music students at the School of Education, Akita University, Japan. None had any signs or history of neurological, cardiovascular or psychiatric disease. All subjects gave written informed consent after the purpose and the procedure of the examination had been fully explained to them. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Research Institute for Brain and Blood

Results

For behavioral measures of performances, all subjects showed about 70% correct responses in both the harmony-listening and the alto-part-listening conditions. The two tasks performed in this study were not tasks which required 'same–different' discrimination. In the harmony-listening condition, eight kinds of chords could be contained in the musical pieces with four vocal parts, namely minor, major, diminished and augmented triad and seventh chord. For the alto-part-listening condition,

Superior parietal lobule

PET studies of attention using the visual modality have provided evidence for neuroanatomical models with three attention networks, namely the posterior and anterior attention networks, and the vigilance network [3]. Superior parietal lobules belong to the posterior attention network and are thought to be involved in selective attention [3]. In a study of global/local visual processing using PET, Fink et al. reported that activation in left parieto–occipital cortex was observed, comprising the

Conclusion

When subjects concentrated on the alto part of the harmony, bilateral superior parietal lobules, bilateral precunei, bilateral premotor areas and bilateral orbital frontal cortices were significantly activated compared with the harmony-listening condition. We propose that functional neuroanatomical processes during the alto-part-listening condition were as follows: superior parietal lobules are activated in relation to auditory selective attention. The tones of the alto part are written on a

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