Representational dynamics of listened and imagined musical sound sequences
David Ricardo Quiroga-Martinez, Robert Knight, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley, United States; Leonardo Bonetti, Center for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Linacre College & Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, United Kingdom; Peter Vuust, Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University and the Royal Academy of Music, Denmark, Denmark
Session:
Posters 3 Poster
Location:
Pacific Ballroom H-O
Presentation Time:
Sat, 27 Aug, 19:30 - 21:30 Pacific Time (UTC -8)
Abstract:
Imagine a song you know by heart. With low effort you could play it vividly in your mind. However, little is known about how the brain represents and holds in mind such musical “thoughts”. Here, we leverage time-generalized decoding from MEG brain source activations to show that listened and imagined melodies are represented in auditory cortex, thalamus and middle cingulate cortex. Accuracy patterns reveal that during listening and imagining sounds are represented as a melodic group, while during listening they are also represented individually. Opposite brain activation patterns distinguish between melodies during listening compared to imagining. Our work sheds light on the representational dynamics of listened and imagined musical sound sequences.