Harmony wants to sit in the front - Different Brain Responses to Violations in Chord Progressions

2009

Deviations from auditory regularities elicit electric potentials distributed over the frontal regions of the scalp. The mismatch negativity (MMN) is elicited by change in repetitive auditory input, whereas the early right anterior negativity (ERAN) is elicited when sounds deviate from a hierarchically organized musical regularity. In this study we wished to disentangle the functional roles of these two brain processes associated with the detection of sequential vs. hierarchical musical violations by studying the localization of their neural generators. Subjects listened to musical cadences constituted by seven chords, each containing either harmonically congruous chords, harmonically incong…