González-García Nadia, Rendón Pablo L
Hospital Infantil de México "Federico Gómez".
Centro de Ciencias Aplicadas y Desarrollo Tecnológico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México;
J Vis Exp. 2017 May 23(123):55419. doi: 10.3791/55419.
The neural correlates of consonance and dissonance perception have been widely studied, but not the neural correlates of consonance and dissonance production. The most straightforward manner of musical production is singing, but, from an imaging perspective, it still presents more challenges than listening because it involves motor activity. The accurate singing of musical intervals requires integration between auditory feedback processing and vocal motor control in order to correctly produce each note. This protocol presents a method that permits the monitoring of neural activations associated with the vocal production of consonant and dissonant intervals. Four musical intervals, two consonant and two dissonant, are used as stimuli, both for an auditory discrimination test and a task that involves first listening to and then reproducing given intervals. Participants, all female vocal students at the conservatory level, were studied using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) during the performance of the singing task, with the listening task serving as a control condition. In this manner, the activity of both the motor and auditory systems was observed, and a measure of vocal accuracy during the singing task was also obtained. Thus, the protocol can also be used to track activations associated with singing different types of intervals or with singing the required notes more accurately. The results indicate that singing dissonant intervals requires greater participation of the neural mechanisms responsible for the integration of external feedback from the auditory and sensorimotor systems than does singing consonant intervals.
协和与不协和感知的神经关联已得到广泛研究，但协和与不协和发声的神经关联却未被研究。最直接的音乐发声方式是唱歌，但从成像角度来看，唱歌仍比聆听带来更多挑战，因为它涉及运动活动。准确唱出音程需要听觉反馈处理与发声运动控制之间的整合，以便正确发出每个音符。本方案提出了一种方法，可用于监测与协和及不协和音程的发声相关的神经激活。四个音乐音程，两个协和音程和两个不协和音程，用作听觉辨别测试和先聆听然后再现给定音程任务的刺激。参与者均为音乐学院水平的女性声乐学生，在执行唱歌任务期间使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）进行研究，聆听任务作为对照条件。通过这种方式，观察了运动和听觉系统的活动，还获得了唱歌任务期间发声准确性的测量结果。因此，该方案还可用于追踪与唱出不同类型音程或更准确唱出所需音符相关的激活。结果表明，与唱出协和音程相比，唱出不协和音程需要负责整合来自听觉和感觉运动系统的外部反馈的神经机制更多地参与。
