ERP signatures of accent processing and musical phrasing

Abstract: Accents in music can be realized in various ways, including tone shortening or lengthening, changes in melodic contour, and timbre changes. Previous ERP research has typically employed simple oddball paradigms focusing on one accent type at a time, and has found mismatch negativities and P300 components. I will present data of a recent study looking at interactions among accent types in more complex musical stimuli (short melodies). The second part of the talk will address the controversial question as to whether prosodic phrasing in speech and music rely on similar or domain-specific neuro-cognitive mechanisms. After providing an overview of previous ERP findings in both areas, I will discuss a recent ERP experiment on boundary perception that employed a stimulus continuum ranging from original speech signals to hummed sentence melodies to music-like stimuli derived from the speech signals.

Dr. Karsten Steinhauer is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at McGill University, Faculty of Medicine.