Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in the perception and production of music, including the perception of consonance and dissonance, or the judgment of certain combinations of pitches as more pleasant than others. Two perceptual cues for dissonance are inharmonicity (the lack of a common fundamental frequency between components) and beating (amplitude fluctuations produced by close, interacting frequency components). Amusic individuals have previously been reported to be insensitive to inharmonicity, but to exhibit normal sensitivity to beats. In the present study, we measured adaptive discrimination thresholds in amusic participants and found elevated thresholds for both cues. We recorded EEG and measured the MMN in evoked potentials to consonance and dissonance deviants in an oddball paradigm. The amplitude of the MMN response was similar overall for amusic and control participants; however, in controls, there was a tendency toward larger MMNs for inharmonicity than for beating cues, whereas the opposite tendency was observed for the amusic participants. These findings suggest that initial encoding of consonance cues may be intact in amusia despite impaired behavioral performance, but that the relative weight of nonspectral (beating) cues may be increased for amusic individuals.

Recent research suggests that perception and action are strongly interrelated and that motor experience may aid memory recognition. We investigated the role of motor experience in auditory memory recognition processes by musicians using behavioral, ERP, and neural source current density measures. Skilled pianists learned one set of novel melodies by producing them and another set by perception only. Pianists then completed an auditory memory recognition test during which the previously learned melodies were presented with or without an out-of-key pitch alteration while the EEG was recorded. Pianists indicated whether each melody was altered from or identical to one of the original melodies. Altered pitches elicited a larger N2 ERP component than original pitches, and pitches within previously produced melodies elicited a larger N2 than pitches in previously perceived melodies. Cortical motor planning regions were more strongly activated within the time frame of the N2 following altered pitches in previously produced melodies compared with previously perceived melodies, and larger N2 amplitudes were associated with greater detection accuracy following production learning than perception learning. Early sensory (N1) and later cognitive (P3a) components elicited by pitch alterations correlated with predictions of sensory echoic and schematic tonality models, respectively, but only for the perception learning condition, suggesting that production experience alters the extent to which performers rely on sensory and tonal recognition cues. These findings provide evidence for distinct time courses of sensory, schematic, and motoric influences within the same recognition task and suggest that learned auditory–motor associations influence responses to out-of-key pitches.

The present study investigated the ERP correlates of the influence of tonal expectations on pitch processing. Participants performed a pitch discrimination task between penultimate and final tones of melodies. These last two tones were a repetition of the same musical note, but penultimate tones were always in tune whereas final tones were slightly out of tune in half of the trials. The pitch discrimination task allowed us to investigate the influence of tonal expectations in attentive listening and, for penultimate tones, without being confounded by decisional processes (occurring on final tones). Tonal expectations were manipulated by a tone change in the first half of the melodies that changed their tonality, hence changing the tonal expectedness of penultimate and final tones without modifying them acoustically. Manipulating tonal expectations with minimal acoustic changes allowed us to focus on the cognitive expectations based on listeners' knowledge of tonal structures. For penultimate tones, tonal expectations modulated processing within the first 100 msec after onset resulting in an Nb/P1 complex that differed in amplitude between tonally related and less related conditions. For final tones, out-of-tune tones elicited an N2/P3 complex and, on in-tune tones only, tonal manipulation elicited an ERAN/RATN-like negativity overlapping with the N2. Our results suggest that cognitive tonal expectations can influence pitch perception at several steps of processing, starting with early attentional selection of pitch.

We tested whether the emergence of familiarity to a melody may trigger or co-occur with the processing of the concept(s) conveyed by emotions to, or semantic association with, the melody. With this objective, we recorded ERPs while participants were presented with highly familiar and less familiar melodies in a gating paradigm. The ERPs time locked to a tone of the melody called the “familiarity emergence point” showed a larger fronto-central negativity for highly familiar compared with less familiar melodies between 200 and 500 msec, with a peak latency around 400 msec. This latency and the sensitivity to the degree of familiarity/conceptual information suggest that this component was an N400, a marker of conceptual processing. Our data suggest that the feeling of familiarity evoked by a musical excerpt could be accompanied by other processing mechanisms at the conceptual level. Coupling the gating paradigm with ERP analyses might become a new avenue for investigating the neurocognitive basis of implicit musical knowledge.