How and Where Your Brain Responds to Music Reveals If You Are a Musician

The study utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain data collected by Prof. Elvira Brattico’s team (previously at University of Helsinki and currently at Aarhus University) from 18 musicians and 18 non-musicians while they attentively listened to music of different genres. Computational algorithms were applied to extract musical features from the presented music.

“A novel feature of our approach was that, instead of relying on static representations of brain activity, we modelled how music is processed in the brain over time,” explains Pasi Saari, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä and the main author of the study. “Taking the temporal dynamics into account was found to improve the results remarkably.” As the last step of modelling, the researchers used machine learning to form a model that predicts musicianship from a combination of brain regions.

The machine learning model was able to predict the listeners’ musicianship with 77% accuracy, a result that is on a par with similar studies on participant classification with, for example, clinical populations of brain-damaged patients. The areas where music processing best predicted musicianship resided mostly in the right hemisphere, and included areas previously found to be associated with engagement and attention, processing of musical conventions, and processing of music-related sound features (e.g. pitch and tonality).

“These areas can be regarded as core structures in music processing which are most affected by intensive, lifelong musical training,” states Iballa Burunat, a co-author of the study. In these areas, the processing of higher-level features such as tonality and pulse was the best predictor of musicianship, suggesting that musical training affects particularly the processing of these aspects of music.

“The novelty of our approach is the integration of computational acoustic feature extraction with functional neuroimaging measures, obtained in a realistic music-listening environment, and taking into account the dynamics of neural processing. It represents a significant contribution that complements recent brain-reading methods which decode participant information from brain activity in realistic conditions,” concludes Petri Toiviainen, the senior author of the study. The research was funded by the Academy of Finland and Danish National Research Foundation.

Elvira Brattico 

 Citation: Saari, P., Burunat, I., Brattico, E., & Toiviainen, P. (2018). Decoding musical training from dynamic processing of musical features in the brain. Scientific Reports 8, Article number: 708. DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-19177-5
link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19177-5