Early auditory processing in musicians and dancers during a contemporary dance piece

Abstract

The neural responses to simple tones and short sound sequences have been studied extensively. However, in reality the sounds surrounding us are spectrally and temporally complex, dynamic and overlapping. Thus, research using natural sounds is crucial in understanding the operation of the brain in its natural environment. Music is an excellent example of natural stimulation which, in addition to sensory responses, elicits vast cognitive and emotional processes in the brain. Here we show that the preattentive P50 response evoked by rapid increases in timbral brightness during continuous music is enhanced in dancers when compared to musicians and laymen. In dance, fast changes in brightness are often emphasized with a significant change in movement. In addition, the auditory N100 and P200 responses are suppressed and sped up in dancers, musicians and laymen when music is accompanied with a dance choreography. These results were obtained with a novel event-related potential (ERP) method for natural music. They suggest that we can begin studying the brain with long pieces of natural music using the ERP method of electroencephalography (EEG) as has already been done with functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), these two brain imaging methods complementing each other.

Figure 1. Brain responses of rapid increase in the musical feature brightness in musicians, dancers and laymen during auditory (music) and audio-visual (music and dance) condition.

The absolute values of the amplitudes of the EEG epochs are presented over the 16 electrodes in the fronto-central region with the EEG epochs from −3 seconds to +2 seconds from the stimulus onset, and the temporal evolution of the musical feature brightness for the same 5-second time window. The stimulus onset is defined by the end of the Preceding Low-Feature Phase (PLFP) period.

Figure 2. ERPs of the mean value over the averaged signal of 16 electrodes for the rapid changes in the musical features brightness, RMS, zero-crossing rate and spectral flux during the presentation of the auditory stimulus only (music; graphs in the column on the left) and during the stimulus of audiovisual entity (music and dance; graphs in the column on right).

In each graph three groups of participants are compared: Musicians, dancers and control group. For brightness, RMS, zero-crossing rate and spectral flux the amount of extracted epochs for each test subject were 9, 8, 8 and 10, respectively, excluding a minimal amount of epochs rejected due to noisy data.

Figure 3. Scalp maps for the P50 (above), N100 (middle) and P200 responses (below) of brightness for musicians, dancers and laymen in auditory (music) and audio-visual (music and dance) condition.