How the brain recognizes familiar music
鈥淭he memory benefit that comes from performing a melody rather than just listening to it, or saying a word out loud rather than just hearing or reading it, is known as the 鈥檖roduction effect鈥� on memory鈥�, says Prof. Palmer, a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Performance.聽 鈥淪cientists have debated whether the production effect is due to motor memories, such as knowing the feel of a particular sequence of finger movements on piano keys, or simply due to strengthened auditory memories, such as knowing how the melody tones should sound. Our paper provides new evidence that motor memories play a role in improving listeners鈥� recognition of tones they have previously performed.鈥澛犅犅�
For the study, researchers recruited twenty skilled pianists from Lyon, France.聽 The group was asked to learn simple melodies by either hearing them several times or performing them several times on a piano.聽 Pianists then heard all of the melodies they had learned, some of which contained wrong notes, while their brain electric signals were measured using electroencephalography (EEG).聽
鈥淲e found that pianists were better at recognizing pitch changes in melodies they had performed earlier,鈥� said the study鈥檚 first author, Brian Mathias, a 91社区 PhD student who conducted the work at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre in France with additional collaborators Drs. Barbara Tillmann and Fabien Perrin.
The team found that EEG measurements revealed larger changes in brain waves and increased motor activity for previously performed melodies than for heard melodies about 200 milliseconds after the wrong notes. This reveals that the brain quickly compares incoming auditory information with motor information stored in memory, allowing us to recognize whether a sound is familiar.
鈥淭his paper helps us understand 鈥榚xperiential learning鈥�, or 鈥榣earning by doing鈥�, and offers pedagogical and clinical implications,鈥� said Mathias, 鈥淭he role of the motor system in recognizing music, and perhaps also speech, could inform education theory by providing strategies for memory enhancement for students and teachers.鈥澛�
This study was conducted within the framework of the European Erasmus Mundus Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience exchange program, in which North American researchers complete a research project in collaboration with a European laboratory for 6-12 months.聽
Prof. Palmer鈥檚 Sequence Production Lab: /spl/
