Multi-Variate EEG Analysis as a Novel Tool to Examine Brain Responses to Naturalistic Music Stimuli.
Note onsets in music are acoustic landmarks providing auditory cues that underlie the perception of more complex phenomena such as beat, rhythm, and meter. For naturalistic ongoing sounds a detailed view on the neural representation of onset structure is hard to obtain, since, typically, stimulus-related EEG signatures are derived by averaging a high number of identical stimulus presentations. Here, we propose a novel multivariate regression-based method extracting onset-related brain responses from the ongoing EEG. We analyse EEG recordings of nine subjects who passively listened to stimuli from various sound categories encompassing simple tone sequences, full-length romantic piano pieces and natural (non-music) soundscapes. The regression approach reduces the 61-channel EEG to one time course optimally reflecting note onsets. The neural signatures derived by this procedure indeed resemble canonical onset-related ERPs, such as the N1-P2 complex. This EEG projection was then utilized to determine the Cortico-Acoustic Correlation (CACor), a measure of synchronization between EEG signal and stimulus. We demonstrate that a significant CACor (i) can be detected in an individual listener's EEG of a single presentation of a full-length complex naturalistic music stimulus, and (ii) it co-varies with the stimuli's average magnitudes of sharpness, spectral centroid, and rhythmic complexity. In particular, the subset of stimuli eliciting a strong CACor also produces strongly coordinated tension ratings obtained from an independent listener group in a separate behavioral experiment. Thus musical features that lead to a marked physiological reflection of tone onsets also contribute to perceived tension in music.
Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Neurotechnology Group, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Neurophysics Group, Department of Neurology, Charité University Medicine, Berlin, Germany.
Irene
I
Sturm
Neurotechnology Group, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Sven
S
Dähne
Neurotechnology Group, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Bernstein Focus Neurotechnology, Berlin, Germany.
Benjamin
B
Blankertz
Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Neurophysics Group, Department of Neurology, Charité University Medicine, Berlin, Germany; Bernstein Focus Neurotechnology, Berlin, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany.
Gabriel
G
Curio
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D055815:Young Adult