Biology subjects

Pelofi, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Pelofi, C..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Neural Decoding of Musical Engagement Reveals Tension-Release Dynamics

Music listening is one of the most compelling and rewarding activities humans engage in spontaneously. But what exactly catches people"s attention when listening to music remains unclear. Musicologists have argued that tension-release dynamics in music constitute crucial features of the listening experience. They arise from the intertwining of different low-level and high-level features and sit at the core of music enjoyment by engaging listeners dynamically. This study aims to characterize the relationship between tension dynamics and engagement during naturalistic music listening. Using canonical correlation analysis, we decoded the music envelope from EEG and ECoG responses and found that musical tension patterns, as reported by listeners, were predictive of fluctuations in the coupling between the music and the neural response. Importantly, tension dynamics were significantly correlated with neural measures of envelope tracking even after controlling for loudness and musical expectations, confirming the specific and crucial role of musical tension in engaging listeners. These results shed new light on how musical structure gives rise to internal response modulations that, in turn, dynamically reflect musical engagement. This interplay may underlie the pervasive and emotionally rewarding nature of music. Significance StatementThis work addresses a fundamental question in cognition: how engagement dynamically modulates complex auditory input processing. We investigate this issue within the well-controlled yet ecologically valid context of music perception. At the core of the musical experience lies the perception of tension - the shifting sense of expectancy, instability, and resolution that guides listening across time. We show that fluctuations in musical tension, shaped by musical structure, reliably predict modulations of auditory engagement, thereby illuminating an understudied phenomenon: what makes music engaging.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Cortical and behavioural tracking of rhythm in music: Effects of pitch predictability, enjoyment, and expertise

The cortical tracking of stimulus features (such as the sound envelope) is a crucial neural requisite of how we process continuous music. We here tested whether cortical tracking of the beat, typically related to rhythm processing, is modulated by pitch predictability and other top-down factors. Participants listened to tonal (high pitch predictability) and atonal (low pitch predictability) music while undergoing EEG, and we analysed their cortical tracking of the acoustic envelope. Interestingly, cortical envelope tracking was stronger while listening to atonal than tonal music, likely reflecting listeners violated pitch expectations. Envelope tracking was also stronger with more expertise and enjoyment. Furthermore, we analysed cortical tracking of pitch surprisal (using IDyOM) and show that listeners expectations for tonal and atonal music match those computed by the IDyOM model, with higher surprisal (prediction errors) for atonal than tonal music. Behaviourally, we measured participants ability to tap along to the beat of tonal and atonal sequences in two experiments. In both experiments, finger-tapping performance was better in the tonal than the atonal condition, indicating a positive effect of pitch predictability on behavioural rhythm processing. Cortical envelope tracking predicted tapping performance for tonal music, as did pitch surprisal tracking for atonal music, indicating that conditions of high and low predictability might impose different processing regimes. We show that cortical envelope tracking, beyond reflecting musical rhythm processing, is modulated by pitch predictability, as well as musical expertise and enjoyment. Taken together, our results show various ways in which those top-down factors impact musical rhythm processing.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Neural basis of melodic learning explains cross-cultural regularities in musical scales

SummarySeeking exposure to unfamiliar experiences constitutes an essential aspect of the human condition, and the brain must adapt to the constantly changing environment by learning the evolving statistical patterns emerging from it. Cultures are shaped by norms and conventions and therefore novel exposure to an unfamiliar culture induces a type of learning that is often described as implicit: when exposed to a set of stimuli constrained by unspoken rules, cognitive systems must rapidly build a mental representation of the underlying grammar. Music offers a unique opportunity to investigate this implicit statistical learning, as sequences of tones forming melodies exhibit structural properties learned by listeners during short- and long-term exposure. Understanding which specific structural properties of music enhance learning in naturalistic learning conditions reveals hard-wired properties of cognitive systems while elucidating the prevalence of these features across cultural variations. Here we provide behavioral and neural evidence that the prevalence of non-uniform musical scales may be explained by their facilitating effects on melodic learning. In this study, melodies were generated using an artificial grammar with either a uniform (rare) or non-uniform (prevalent) scale. After a short exposure phase, listeners had to detect ungrammatical new melodies while their EEG responses were recorded. Listeners performance on the task suggested that the extent of statistical learning during music listening depended on the musical scale context: non-uniform scales yielded better syntactic learning. This behavioral effect was mirrored by enhanced encoding of musical syntax in the context of non-uniform scales, which further suggests that their prevalence stems from fundamental properties of learning.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Cortical encoding of melodic expectations in human temporal cortex

Humans engagement in music rests on underlying elements such as the listeners cultural background and general interest in music, all shaping the way music is processed in the brain and perceived. Crucially, these factors modulate how listeners anticipate musical events, a process inducing instantaneous neural responses as the music confronts these expectations. Measuring such neural correlates would represent a direct window into high-level brain processing of music. Here we recorded electroencephalographic and electrocorticographic brain responses as participants listened to Bach melodies. We assessed the relative contributions of the acoustic versus melodic components of the music to the neural signal. Acoustic features included envelope and its derivative. Melodic features included information on melodic progressions (pitch) and their tempo (onsets), which were extracted from a Markov model predicting the next note based on a corpus of Western music and the preceding proximal musical context. We related the music to brain activity with a linear temporal response function, and demonstrated that cortical responses to music encode melodic expectations. Specifically, individual-subject neural signals were better predicted by a combination of acoustic and melodic expectation features than by either alone. This effect was most pronounced at response latencies up to 350ms, and in both planum temporale and Heschls gyrus. Finally, expectations of pitch and onset-time of musical notes exerted independent cortical effects, and such influences were modulated by the listeners musical expertise. Overall, this study demonstrates how the interplay of experimental and theoretical approaches can yield novel insights into the cortical encoding of melodic expectations.

neuroscience↗