Abstract Joint music performance requires flexible sensorimotor coordination between self and other. Cognitive and sensory parameters of joint action—such as shared knowledge or temporal (a)synchrony—influence this coordination by shifting the balance between self-other segregation and integration. To investigate the neural bases of these parameters and their interaction during joint action, we asked pianists to play on an MR-compatible piano, in duet with a partner outside of the scanner room. Motor knowledge of the partner’s musical part and the temporal compatibility of the partner’s action feedback were manipulated. First, we found stronger activity and functional connectivity within cortico-cerebellar audio-motor networks when pianists had practiced their partner’s part before. This indicates that they simulated and anticipated the auditory feedback of the partner by virtue of an internal model. Second, we observed stronger cerebellar activity and reduced behavioral adaptation when pianists encountered subtle asynchronies between these model-based anticipations and the perceived sensory outcome of (familiar) partner actions, indicating a shift towards self-other segregation. These combined findings demonstrate that cortico-cerebellar audio-motor networks link motor knowledge and other-produced sounds depending on cognitive and sensory factors of the joint performance, and play a crucial role in balancing self-other integration and segregation.

https://academic.oup.com/cercor/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/cercor/bhac243/44318728/bhac243.pdf

Cortico-cerebellar audio-motor regions coordinate self and other in musical joint action

Abstract How does perception of abstract tonal patterns—music—lead to the pleasure we experience from these sounds? The answer presented in this book is that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable processing of sound patterns and subcortical circuits responsible for reward and valuation. The auditory cortex and its ventral-stream connections encode acoustical features and their relationships, maintain them in working memory, and form internal representations of statistical patterns from which predictions are made about how sound patterns evolve in time. Disruption of this pathway leads to amusia. The auditory dorsal stream allows for sensory-motor transformations, music production, and metrical representation, leading to predictions of when events will occur. These predictive processes play a central role in creating expectancies about musical events that are transmitted to the dopaminergic reward system, where hedonic responses are generated according to how well an event fits with predictions. These responses are linked to the balance between predictability and surprise in musical patterns. Disruption of interactions between perceptual and reward systems leads to musical anhedonia. Engagement of the reward system is also related to movement and vocal cues, social factors, musical preference, and emotion regulation. 

From Perception to Pleasure

From auditory perception to general cognition, the ability to play a musical instrument has been associated with skills both related and unrelated to music. However, it is unclear if these effects are bound to the specific characteristics of musical instrument training, as little attention has been paid to other populations such as audio engineers and designers whose auditory expertise may match or surpass that of musicians in specific auditory tasks or more naturalistic acoustic scenarios. We explored this possibility by comparing students of audio engineering (n = 20) to matched conservatory-trained instrumentalists (n = 24) and to naive controls (n = 20) on measures of auditory discrimination, auditory scene analysis, and speech in noise perception. We found that audio engineers and performing musicians had generally lower psychophysical thresholds than controls, with pitch perception showing the largest effect size. Compared to controls, audio engineers could better memorise and recall auditory scenes composed of non-musical sounds, whereas instrumental musicians performed best in a sustained selective attention task with two competing streams of tones. Finally, in a diotic speech-in-babble task, musicians showed lower signal-to-noise-ratio thresholds than both controls and engineers; however, a follow-up online study did not replicate this musician advantage. We also observed differences in personality that might account for group-based self-selection biases. Overall, we showed that investigating a wider range of forms of auditory expertise can help us corroborate (or challenge) the specificity of the advantages previously associated with musical instrument training. 

Generalization of auditory expertise in audio engineers and instrumental musicians

Peculiarities of creative thinking development within the educational piano playing course

The perception of a melody is invariant to the absolute properties of its constituting notes, but depends on the relation between them-the melody's relative pitch profile. In fact, a melody's "Gestalt" is recognized regardless of the instrument or key used to play it. Pitch processing in general is assumed to occur at the level of the auditory cortex. However, it is unknown whether early auditory regions are able to encode pitch sequences integrated over time (i.e., melodies) and whether the resulting representations are invariant to specific keys. Here, we presented participants different melodies composed of the same 4 harmonic pitches during functional magnetic resonance imaging recordings. Additionally, we played the same melodies transposed in different keys and on different instruments. We found that melodies were invariantly represented by their blood oxygen level-dependent activation patterns in primary and secondary auditory cortices across instruments, and also across keys. Our findings extend common hierarchical models of auditory processing by showing that melodies are encoded independent of absolute pitch and based on their relative pitch profile as early as the primary auditory cortex.

Coding of melodic Gestalt in human auditory cortex

Understanding how perception and action are coupled in the brain has important implications for training, rehabilitation, and brain-machine interfaces. Ideomotor theory postulates that willed actions are represented through previously experienced effects and initiated by the anticipation of those effects. Previous research has accordingly found that sensory events, if previously associated with action outcomes, can induce activity in motor regions. However, it remains unclear whether the motor-related activity induced during perception of more naturalistic sequences of actions actually represents "sequence-specific" information. In the present study, nonmusicians were firstly trained to play two melodies on the piano; secondly, they performed an fMRI experiment while listening to these melodies as well as novel, untrained melodies; thirdly, multivariate pattern analysis was used to test if voxel-wise patterns of brain activity could identify trained, but not novel melodies. The results importantly show that after associative learning, a series of sensory events can trigger sequence-specific representations in both sensory and motor networks. Interestingly, also novel melodies could be classified in multiple regions, including default mode regions. A control experiment confirmed these outcomes to be training-dependent. We discuss how action-perception coupling may enable spontaneous near transfer and action simulation during action observation.

/pdf/action-perception-coupling-and-near-transfer-listening-to-28nt0efx8y.pdf

Action-Perception Coupling and Near Transfer: Listening to Melodies after Piano Practice Triggers Sequence-Specific Representations in the Auditory-Motor Network.

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Action-Perception Coupling and Near Transfer: Listening to Melodies after Piano Practice Triggers Sequence-Specific Representations in the Auditory-Motor Network.