![]() ![]() Although some earlier research has looked at the MMNm response to musical intervals, none has yet looked at the role of interval or pitch shift in relation to the size of the MMNm. ![]() The present investigation uses the MMNm response as a tool to measure how, when, and by how much our electrophysiological response is modulated by various abstract and concrete differences between a dyad when it serves as a standard versus when it serves as a deviant. The MMNm functions as a preattentive difference detector, and is activated by deviants in a stream of standards that can vary over any number of dimensions in various modalities (for an overview, see Ref. We examined an early, automatic, and robust response to oddball stimuli: the magnetoencephalographic mismatch-negativity field (MMNm). In this study, we investigate the difference in electrophysiological response to dyads with simple ratios in a mismatch-negativity paradigm. Moreover, examining how our brains process dyads can help improve our understanding of vowel processing, given that two formants are the minimum required for vowel identification. Dyads serve as a particularly good starting point for understanding complex auditory signals, as they are the smallest harmonically complex musical unit. In this study, we examine two-note chords or dyads. In comparison, on the neurophysiological side, although many researchers have looked at the brain responses to single tones, phonemes, or clicks, as well as words, complex chords, or phrases, thus far there is a relative dearth of studies examining basic auditory responses to the simplest sort of simultaneous musical expressions, two-tone stimuli (Jenkins J, Poeppel D, Idsardi W, in preparation). There has also been much research on three-note chords and chord progressions showing that listeners have very specific expectations about which chords are licit given a certain key and chordal context (for a comprehensive summary, see Ref. Other research has shown a role for directionality in analysis of mistuned intervals. Although there is a wealth of behavioral literature on human processing of simple and complex musical events, and an emerging literature on the neurophysiological responses to auditory stimuli (Jenkins J, Poeppel D, Idsardi W, in preparation ), we have yet to provide an adequate account of how the brain processes the building blocks of complex coherent auditory events such as musical chords.Įarlier behavioral research has shown that both adults and infants are better at discriminating changes to a series of intervals when the intervals used have simple frequency ratios, such as perfect fourths and perfect fifths. ![]()
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