Musical syntax is processed in Broca's area: an MEG study

By Burkhard Maess, Stefan Koelsch, Thomas C. Gunter, Angela D. Friederici. Nature Neuroscience, 2001

956 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The present experiment was designed to localize the neural substrates that process music-syntactic incongruities, using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Electrically, such processing has been proposed to be indicated by early right-anterior negativity (ERAN), which is elicited by harmonically inappropriate chords occurring within a major-minor tonal context. In the present experiment, such chords elicited an early effect, taken as the magnetic equivalent of the ERAN (termed mERAN). The source of mERAN activity was localized in Broca's area and its right-hemisphere homologue, areas involved in syntactic analysis during auditory language comprehension. We find that these areas are also responsible for an analysis of incoming harmonic sequences, indicating that these regions process syntactic information that is less language-specific than previously believed.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/45cd5a4689840b051e4f328ef9eca951fe5d7e14

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The rewards of music listening: Response and physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system (2005, background): “Subjects were non-musicians, that is, they had never learned singing or an instrument, and they did not have any special musical education besides what is normally given in public schools (Maess et al., 2001).”
Adults and children processing music: An fMRI study (2005, methodology): “…musical training were measured, and (5) Neapolitan chords were used as music-structural irregularities, enabling us to relate the present study to previous studies that employed a very similar musical stimulus using EEG (Koelsch et al., 2000, 2001, 2002b,c, 2003) and MEG (Maess et al., 2001).”
INCIDENTAL VOCABULARY LEARNING THROUGH LISTENING TO SONGS (2019, methodology): “Maess et al. (2001), using magnetoencephalography demonstrated that music and melodic patterns are processed in the same area of the brain as language.”
Musician Children Detect Pitch Violations in Both Music and Language Better than Nonmusician Children: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Approaches (2006, background): “Indeed, this brain area was activated not only by syntactic processing of linguistic phrases, but also by syntactic processing of musical phrases ( Maess, Koelsch, Gunter, & Friederici, 2001 ).”
Investigating emotion with music: An fMRI study (2006, result): “…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 not activated in those studies.”
Towards a generative syntax of tonal harmony (2011, background): “On the other hand, empirical findings concerning the cognitive overlap between music and language processing or shared neural substrates 50 51 52 53 provide converging evidence that links with the assumption of some structural parallels.”
Five Facets of Musical Expression: A Psychologist's Perspective on Music Performance (2003, background): “A magnetoencephalography study of musical perception suggested that musical syntax is processed in Broca’s area, which is also involved in syntactic processing during auditory language comprehension (Maess et al., 2001).”
Music and Language: A Developmental Comparison (2004, background): “…words and out-of-key chords tend to elicit an early negative component, stronger on the left in response to speech stimuli (ELAN: Hahne & Friederici, 1999) and on the right for musical stimuli (ERAN: Koelsch, Gunter, Friederici, & Schröger, 2000; Maess, Koelsch, Gunter, & Friederici, 2001).”
Language, music, and the brain: a resource-sharing framework (2011, methodology): “Using MEG, Maess et al. (2001) found that a different ERP”
Musical training influences linguistic abilities in 8-year-old children: more evidence for brain plasticity. (2009, background): “…from music to speech perception and reading skills; these transfers highlight the commonality of pitch processing in music and speech as well as the influence of attention processes (Besson and Schön 2001; Maess et al. 2001; Gaser and Schlaug 2003; Patel 2003; Koelsch et al. 2002, 2003, 2005).”