Tonal expectations and pitch processing: An event-related potentials study

Marmel, F., Perrin, F., & Tillmann, B.

Université de Lyon, Lyon 1, CNRS-UMR 5020, IFR 19, France

(in preparation)

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to

Frédéric Marmel

Université Claude Bernard - Lyon I

CNRS UMR 5020

Neurosciences Sensorielles Comportement Cognition

50 Av. Tony Garnier

F-69366 Lyon Cedex 07

France

Tel : +33 (0) 4 37 28 74 90

Fax : +33 (0) 4 37 28 76 01

frederic.marmel@olfac.univ-lyon1.fr

The present study aimed to investigate the neural correlates of the influence of tonal expectations on pitch processing. To focus on tonal expectations on a cognitive level, we composed melodies that differed by only one (possibly repeated) tone in their first half, and this difference resulted in the last tone being either a tonic (related) or a subdominant (less related). Pitch processing was investigated with a pitch discrimination task. The last tone of the melodies was repeated, with its repetition being either identical or slightly mistuned, and participants judged whether the two final tones were same or different.

The repeated target design aimed to investigate the neural correlates of tonal expectations (on penultimate and final tones) and of pitch processing (on final tones). For the penultimate tones, tonally related tones elicited higher P1, P2, and LPC than less related tones. For the final tones, mistuned tones elicited higher N350 and P600 than in-tune tones. These results suggest that top-down processes linked to tonal expectations influence pitch processing at multiple levels of processing, including decisional levels, encoding in working memory, and early attentional selection.

Music perception is a complex ability that goes beyond just hearing successive sounds. Western music contains many structural regularities to which listeners are sensitive (Francès, 1958). When hearing music, listeners use their knowledge of these regularities to “organize all the pitch-events of a piece into a single coherent structure” (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983, p.106) and develop expectations about future events. Though some of these structural regularities concern the time dimension (rhythmic and metric regularities), the central perceptual dimension of music is pitch. Pitch regularities concerns simple patterns like tone repetition, melodic contour and interval size, but also more abstract patterns like tonal structure. Numerous studies have highlighted the role of tonal structure on musical processing (see Bigand & Poulin-Charronnat, 2006; Francès, 1958; Krumhansl, 1990; Tillmann, Bharucha, & Bigand, 2000 for reviews). Their key finding was that listeners acquire implicit knowledge of the abstract regularities defining tonal structure by mere exposure to tonal music, and that this tonal knowledge drives the formation of expectations for future pitch-events. On the last 15 years, a number of event-related potentials studies have investigated the neural correlates underlying the influence of tonal knowledge on music expectations (Besson & Faïta, 1995; Janata, 1995; Koelsch, Gunter, Friederici, & Schröger, 2000; Koelsch, Jentschke, Sammler, & Mietchen, 2007 ; Koelsch & Sammler, 2008 ; Poulin-Charronnat, Bigand, & Koelsch, 2006 ; Regnault, Bigand, & Besson, 2001), and a smaller number of studies have investigated the neural correlates of the influence of musical expertise and training on pitch processing (Besson, Schön, Moreno, Santos, & Magne, 2007 ; Koelsch, Schröger, & Tervaniemi, 1999 ; Tervaniemi, Just, Koelsch, Widmann, & Schröger, 2005) The present study aimed to investigate the influence of tonal relatedness on the ERPs correlates of pitch processing.