2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

13-16 September 2019    Berlin, Germany

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper: PS-2B.63
Session: Poster Session 2B
Location: H Fläche 1.OG
Session Time: Sunday, September 15, 17:15 - 20:15
Presentation Time:Sunday, September 15, 17:15 - 20:15
Presentation: Poster
Publication: 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, 13-16 September 2019, Berlin, Germany
Paper Title: Influence of Musical Expertise on the processing of Musical Features in a Naturalistic Setting
Manuscript:  Click here to view manuscript
License: Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32470/CCN.2019.1314-0
Authors: Dipankar Niranjan, Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems, IIIT Hyderabad, India; Iballa Burunat, Petri Toiviainen, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland; Elvira Brattico, Center for Music In the Brain, Aarhus University, Denmark; Vinoo Alluri, Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems, IIIT Hyderabad, India
Abstract: Musical training causes structural and functional changes in the brain due to its sensory-motor demands, but the modulatory effect of musical training on music feature processing in the brain in a continuous music listening paradigm, has not been investigated thus far. In this work, we investigate the differences between musicians and non-musicians in the encoding of musical features encompassing musical timbre, rhythm and tone. 18 musicians and 18 non-musicians were scanned using fMRI while listening to 3 varied stimuli. Acoustic features corresponding to timbre, rhythm and tone were computationally extracted from the stimuli and correlated with brain responses, followed by t-tests on group level maps to uncover encoding differences between the two groups. The musicians demonstrated greater involvement of limbic and reward regions, and regions possessing adaptations to music processing due to training, indicating greater analytic processing. However, as a group, they did not exhibit large regions of consistent correlation patterns, especially in processing high-level features, due to differences in processing strategies arising out of their varied training. The non-musicians exhibited broader regions of correlations, implying greater similarities in bottom-up sensory processing.