Daniel A. Abrams

Publication Details

• Inter-subject synchronization of brain responses during natural music listening

  Abrams DA, Ryali S, Chen T, Chordia P, Khouzam A, Levitin DJ, Menon V. European Journal of Neuroscience. 2013

  Music is a cultural universal and a rich part of the human experience. However, little is known about common brain systems that support the processing and integration of extended, naturalistic “real-world” music stimuli. We examined this question by presenting extended excerpts of symphonic music to non-musician participants undergoing functional brain imaging and analyzing synchronized spatiotemporal activity patterns between listeners. We show that music synchronizes brain response across listeners in bilateral auditory midbrain and thalamus, primary auditory and auditory association cortex, right-lateralized structures in frontal and parietal cortex, and motor planning regions of the brain. Inter-subject synchronization in the inferior colliculus and medial geniculate nucleus was greater for the natural music condition compared to a pseudo-musical control condition, indicating that synchronization at these early stages of auditory processing are not simply driven by spectro-temporal features of the stimulus. Increased synchronization during music listening was also evident in right-hemisphere inferior frontal and parietal cortex and bilateral cortical regions involved in motor planning. While these brain structures have previously been implicated in various aspects of musical processing, our results are the first to show that these regions track structural elements of a musical stimulus over extended time periods lasting minutes. Our results show that a hierarchical distributed network x is synchronized between individuals during the processing of extended musical sequences, and provide new insight into the temporal integration of complex and biologically-salient auditory sequences.