The Neurosciences and Music III conference - Part 2

Thursday, June 26th was a packed day with sixteen talks in total!! I made the mistake of attending all sixteen talks, and should have left out a few. So, as one can imagine, my brains were completely saturated by the end of the tenth talk.

The first symposium which consisted of five talks, was on "Rhythms in the brain: Basic science and clinical perspectives." I found Chen et al.'s work on the importance of the premotor cortex in music production, to be the most interesting of the five. Chen et al. subjected participants to various musical rhythm-related tasks that included passive listening, anticipating prior to a motor act, and committing a motor act. Their fMRI results suggested that in addition to using motor areas and the cerebellum for sequencing rhythmic actions, musicians use the prefrontal cortex to a greater extent (their hypothesis: prefrontal activity in musicians is related to their superior ability to organize musical rhythms wrt working memory). Their data also indicated that the posterior STG (superior temporal gyrus) and the premortor cortex are important mediating nodes for transforming auditory information into motor activity. In addition, their data suggested a direct mapping of auditory information to the motor system through auditory links to the ventral premotor cortex. However, the dorsal premotor cortex seemed to have indirect links, for processing higher-order information pertaining to musical rhythm.

The second symposium was short consisting of only two talks, on normal and impaired singing. I liked the second talk by Steven Brown. The first talk on poor pitch singing didn't really offer any new insights. By the end of the talk I had specific questions, but unfortunately, did not receive satisfactory answers. The questions I had were along the lines of: 1) Where do you draw the line between a poor singer and a tone deaf (amusic) person? ( I believe the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, could provide answers to this question). 2) Assuming that a person with normal music perception/recognition abilities, is a good musician (plays an instrument at a fairly accomplished level), and a poor singer, what differentiates this person from a poor singer with music cognition deficiencies? Steven Brown's talk was compelling because it answered my second question by narrowing down the reasons for poor pitch singing (in people with normal music cognition abilities) to deficient or anomalous activation in the larynx motor cortex (in addition to other areas).

The third symposium was on musical training and induced cortical plasticity. All the speakers presented research findings which were generally in support of the notion that musical training and performance induce changes in the brain within limits. The fourth symposium was on music and memory. Emmanuel Bigand's talk was interesting. The attempt of his research was to find the minimum time necessary for activating musical and linguistic memories. Minimum time could also be interpreted as minimum amount of information necessary, in the time course of music recognition. His research suggested that even a slice of information as small as 50ms was enough to "bootstrap" memory for music.

The most interesting talk in this session was that of Isabelle Peretz. Peretz et al. attempted to find out neural correlates of the musical lexicon (storage areas for familiar melodies, or melodies stored in long-term memory). Participants listened to familiar melodies, unfamiliar melodies, and scrambled melodies. Subtraction from fMRI imaging data between familiar melody listening and unfamiliar melody listening suggested two things: 1) the supplementary motor area in the left hemisphere might be involved in "inner singing" or emulation, 2) the right superior temporal sulcus may be involved in the retrieval of information from the musical lexicon.