Poulin-Charronnat Bénédicte, Bigand Emmanuel, Koelsch Stefan
Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2006 Sep;18(9):1545-54. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2006.18.9.1545.
The present study investigates the effect of a change in syntactic-like musical function on event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Eight-chord piano sequences were presented to musically expert and novice listeners. Instructed to watch a movie and to ignore the musical sequences, the participants had to react when a chord was played with a different instrument than the piano. Participants were not informed that the relevant manipulation was the musical function of the last chord (target) of the sequences. The target chord acted either as a syntactically stable tonic chord (i.e., a C major chord in the key of C major) or as a less syntactically stable subdominant chord (i.e., a C major chord in the key of G major). The critical aspect of the results related to the impact such a manipulation had on the ERPs. An N5-like frontal negative component was found to be larger for subdominant than for tonic chords and attained significance only in musically expert listeners. These findings suggest that the subdominant chord is more difficult to integrate with the previous context than the tonic chord (as indexing by the observed N5) and that the processing of a small change in musical function occurs in an automatic way in musically expert listeners. The present results are discussed in relation to previous studies investigating harmonic violations with ERPs.
本研究调查了句法类音乐功能变化对事件相关脑电位（ERP）的影响。向音乐专家和新手听众呈现八和弦钢琴序列。在被要求观看电影并忽略音乐序列的情况下，参与者必须在和弦由非钢琴乐器演奏时做出反应。参与者未被告知相关操作是序列中最后一个和弦（目标和弦）的音乐功能。目标和弦要么作为句法上稳定的主和弦（即C大调中的C大和弦），要么作为句法上不太稳定的下属和弦（即G大调中的C大和弦）。结果的关键方面与这种操作对ERP的影响有关。发现类似N5的额部负性成分在下属和弦中比在主和弦中更大，并且仅在音乐专家听众中具有显著性。这些发现表明，下属和弦比主和弦更难与先前的语境整合（如通过观察到的N5所指示），并且音乐功能的微小变化在音乐专家听众中以自动方式进行处理。结合先前用ERP研究和声违反的研究对本研究结果进行了讨论。
