Effects of context on electrophysiological response to musical accents

Listeners' aesthetic and emotional responses to music typically occur in the context of long musical passages that contain structures defined in terms of the events that precede them. We describe an electrophysiological study of listeners' brain responses to musical accents that coincided in longer musical sequences. Musically trained listeners performed a timbre-change detection task in which a single-tone timbre change was positioned within 4-bar melodies composed of 350-ms tones to coincide or not with melodic contour accents and temporal accents (induced with temporal gaps). Event-related potential responses to (task-relevant) attended timbre changes elicited an early negativity (MMN/N2b) around 200 ms and a late positive component around 350 ms (P300), reflecting updating of the timbre change in working memory. The amplitudes of both components changed systematically across the sequence, consistent with expectancy-based context effects. Furthermore, melodic contour changes modulated the MMN/N2b response (but not the P300) to timbre changes in later sequence positions. In contrast, task-irrelevant temporal gaps elicited an MMN that was not modulated by position within the context; absence of a P300 indicated that temporal-gap accents were not updated in working memory. Listeners' neural responses to musical structure changed systematically as sequential predictability and listeners' expectations changed across the melodic context.