Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland.
Neuroimage. 2012 Feb 15;59(4):3677-89. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.11.019. Epub 2011 Nov 12.
We investigated the neural underpinnings of timbral, tonal, and rhythmic features of a naturalistic musical stimulus. Participants were scanned with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while listening to a stimulus with a rich musical structure, a modern tango. We correlated temporal evolutions of timbral, tonal, and rhythmic features of the stimulus, extracted using acoustic feature extraction procedures, with the fMRI time series. Results corroborate those obtained with controlled stimuli in previous studies and highlight additional areas recruited during musical feature processing. While timbral feature processing was associated with activations in cognitive areas of the cerebellum, and sensory and default mode network cerebrocortical areas, musical pulse and tonality processing recruited cortical and subcortical cognitive, motor and emotion-related circuits. In sum, by combining neuroimaging, acoustic feature extraction and behavioral methods, we revealed the large-scale cognitive, motor and limbic brain circuitry dedicated to acoustic feature processing during listening to a naturalistic stimulus. In addition to these novel findings, our study has practical relevance as it provides a powerful means to localize neural processing of individual acoustical features, be it those of music, speech, or soundscapes, in ecological settings.
我们研究了自然主义音乐刺激的音色、音调和节奏特征的神经基础。参与者在听具有丰富音乐结构的刺激时接受功能磁共振成像 (fMRI) 扫描，这是一首现代探戈。我们将使用声学特征提取程序提取的刺激的音色、音调和节奏特征的时间演化与 fMRI 时间序列相关联。结果与之前使用受控刺激获得的结果一致，并强调了在音乐特征处理过程中招募的其他区域。虽然音色特征处理与小脑的认知区域以及感觉和默认模式网络脑皮层区域的激活有关，但音乐脉冲和音调处理则招募了皮质和皮质下的认知、运动和情绪相关回路。总之，通过结合神经影像学、声学特征提取和行为方法，我们揭示了在听取自然主义刺激时专门用于处理声音特征的大规模认知、运动和边缘大脑回路。除了这些新发现外，我们的研究还具有实际意义，因为它为在生态环境中定位个体声学特征的神经处理提供了一种强大的手段，无论是音乐、语音还是声音景观的特征。
