Bach Speaks: A Cortical "Language-Network" Serves the Processing of Music

By Stefan Koelsch, Thomas C. Gunter, D. Yves v. Cramon, Stefan Zysset, Gabriele Lohmann, Angela D. Friederici. NeuroImage, 2002

520 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim of the present study was the investigation of neural correlates of music processing with fMRI. Chord sequences were presented to the participants, infrequently containing unexpected musical events. These events activated the areas of Broca and Wernicke, the superior temporal sulcus, Heschl's gyrus, both planum polare and planum temporale, as well as the anterior superior insular cortices. Some of these brain structures have previously been shown to be involved in music processing, but the cortical network comprising all these structures has up to now been thought to be domain-specific for language processing. To what extent this network might also be activated by the processing of non-linguistic information has remained unknown. The present fMRI-data reveal that the human brain employs this neuronal network also for the processing of musical information, suggesting that the cortical network known to support language processing is less domain-specific than previously believed.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d39e3a4ce576a41c4c686e6243d19f84a993892

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Citations in the corpus

Brain organization for music processing. (2005, background): “This issue of music and language specificity has a long history in neurology (Henschen 1924) and has been recently reopened by the observation that the detection of harmonic deviations activates Broca’s area (Koelsch et al. 2002).”
The Role of Harmonic Expectancy Violations in Musical Emotions: Evidence from Subjective, Physiological, and Neural Responses (2006, result): “training influences the processing of harmonic rela tionships. Additionally, Koelsch and Mulder (2002) found that nonmusicians were able to detect inappropriate harmonies in piano music by classical composers, as indicated by an ERAN-like effect, a finding relevant to the present study, since the st”
Investigating emotion with music: An fMRI study (2006, background): “…studies indicate that music– syntactic processing involves the frontal operculum, especially inferior BA 44 [Janata et al., 2002a; Koelsch, 2005; Koelsch et al., 2005, 2002; Maess et al., 2001; Tillmann et al., 2003], which was also activated in the present study; the Rolandic operculum was…”
The Cognition of Tonality – as We Know it Today (2004, methodology): “In the Koelsch et al. (2002) experiment, the primary task was to judge whether notes in a deviant timbre had occurred, with a secondary task of detecting dissonant tone clusters.”
Rethinking the neurological basis of language (2005, methodology): “Listening to complex music and mentally rehearsing music activate much the same areas as language, both Broca’s and Wernicke’s (Hickok et al., 2003; Koelsch et al., 2002).”
Sparse logistic regression for whole brain classification of fMRI data (2010, background): “…be distinguished by discrete but distributed structures largely confined to the temporal and frontal lobes which have previously been implicated in speech and music processing (Formisano et al., 2008; Friederici et al., 2003; Koelsch et al., 2002; Levitin and Menon, 2003; Tervaniemi et al., 2006).”
Shared and distinct neural correlates of singing and speaking (2006, background): “…production, has been found to be activated by various musical tasks, among them pitch and rhythm discrimination , pitch memory, and musical syntax (Binder et al., 1997; Platel et al., 1997, 1998; Maess et al., 2001; Koelsch et al., 2002, 2005; Griffiths, 2003; Gaab et al., 2003; Patel, 2003).”
Music, biological evolution, and the brain (2010, background): “Subsequently, neuroimaging studies using a variety of techniques (e.g., MEG, fMRI) have suggested overlap in brain areas involved in linguistic syntactic processing and musical tonal-harmonic processing (e.g., Maess et al., 2001; Koelsch et al., 2002; Tillmann et al., 2003; Patel, in press(b)).”
Neural specializations for speech and pitch: moving beyond the dichotomies (2008, background): “This area is not domain-specific since it is similarly recruited for extraction and maintenance of pitch information in processing music (Zatorre et al. 1994; Koelsch et al. 2002).”
The emergence of music from the Theory of Mind (2009, background): “…to language (Brown, 2000b; Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983; Pinker, 1997) where the apparent overlap in brain regions associated with the two domains is consistent with the possibility that music is an instance of a broader function (Koelsch et al., 2002, 2004; Patel, 2003; Peretz & Zatorre, 2003).”
Shared networks for auditory and motor processing in professional pianists: Evidence from fMRI conjunction (2006, result): “As for the activity in supplementary and premotor areas, one might compare the increased activity in the musicians in this study with the decreased activity in musicians (vs. non-musicians) during motor tasks found by other researchers (Jäncke et al., 2000; Krings et al., 2000).”
Musical structure is processed in "language" areas of the brain: a possible role for Brodmann Area 47 in temporal coherence (2003, background): “Koelsch et al. (2002) found activation in the pars opercularis region in response to violations of musical expectation .”