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Abstract:
The recognition of familiar music is immediate and easy.
Therefore, music recognition may involve a specialized neural
system. The goal of the present study was to identify its neural
correlates. Nine non-musicians were scanned with functional
magnetic resonance imaging while listening passively to familiar
and unfamiliar melodies. Subjects were scanned with an
event-related design and volume acquisition that occurred every
11.5 s. Twenty-eight familiar melodies were created from
instrumental pieces so as to avoid any verbal association;
unfamiliar melodies were retrograde adaptations of the familiar
melodies. The control condition consisted of 28 scrambled melodies.
A silent control condition was also used. Listening to familiar
melodies as compared to unfamiliar melodies is specifically
associated with activation in the left supplementary motor area
(SMA) and the right superior temporal sulcus (STS). We suggest that
the SMA involvement is likely to be related to inner singing. The
STS may be more related to the retrieval of information from
musical memory. As expected, the results showed vast activation in
auditory cortices during all conditions compared to silence.
Additional activation in the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL)
was also seen which seems to be associated with processing of
musical structure.
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