Emma Barnard | 2025 I.S. Symposium

Name: Emma Barnard
Title: The Sound of Neuro: An Electrophysiological look at Music in the Brain
Major: Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience
Minors: Music and Biology
Advisor: Grit Herzmann; Peiyao Chen

Music perception involves complex cognitive processes to decipher elements of music like pitch and timbre. Musical expertise involves training in these processes and can be studied to understand the cognitive and neural processes underlying music cognition. This study investigated the underlying brain processes of disruptions in musical phrases. It examined how disruptions (called deviants) in pitch, timbre, intensity, and slide were processed within complex musical phrases (i.e., melodies) and what impact musical expertise has on music cognition. Participants were musicians (N = 26) and non-musicians (N = 26). To quantify musical expertise, participants took the Musical Ear Test and Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index. Stimuli consisted of single music notes arranged in pseudo-randomized melodies with deviants every eight notes. EEG data was collected to measure MMN, P3, and N1 ERP components. The MMN showed more overall activation for preattentional awareness of pattern changes in intensity and timbre deviants whereas the P3a showed more activation for attentional changes in the pitch and slide deviants. Differences in musical training did not affect perception of the conditions (standard, pitch, slide, timbre, and intensity). The musician group had higher overall activation for detection of pattern changes than the non-musician group in the MMN component. The results of this study provided insights into the time course of music cognition displaying larger preattentional awareness of pattern changes for timbre and intensity and larger attention switching activations for pitch and slide. Musical expertise does not have an effect of individual deviant activation yet facilitated overall pre-attentive recognition activation.

Posted in Symposium 2025 on May 1, 2025.