Familiarity Affects Entrainment of EEG in Music Listening

ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 26 July 2017 doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00384 Familiarity Affects Entrainment of EEG in Music Listening Yuiko Kumagai 1 , Mahnaz Arvaneh 2 and Toshihisa Tanaka 1, 3* 1 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Koganei-shi, Japan, Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom, 3 RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako-shi, Japan 2 Music perception involves complex brain functions. The relationship between music and brain such as cortical entrainment to periodic tune, periodic beat, and music have been well investigated. It has also been reported that the cerebral cortex responded more strongly to the periodic rhythm of unfamiliar music than to that of familiar music. However, previous works mainly used simple and artificial auditory stimuli like pure tone or beep. It is still unclear how the brain response is influenced by the familiarity of music. To address this issue, we analyzed electroencelphalogram (EEG) to investigate the relationship between cortical response and familiarity of music using melodies produced by piano sounds as simple natural stimuli. The cross-correlation function averaged across trials, channels, and participants showed two pronounced peaks at time lags around 70 and 140 ms. At the two peaks the magnitude of the cross-correlation values were significantly larger when listening to unfamiliar and scrambled music compared to those when listening to familiar music. Our findings suggest that the response to unfamiliar music is stronger than that to familiar music. One potential application of our findings would be the discrimination of listeners’ familiarity with music, which provides an important tool for assessment of brain activity. Edited by: Lutz Jäncke, University of Zurich, Switzerland Reviewed by: Karsten Specht, University of Bergen, Norway Gunter Kreutz, University of Oldenburg, Germany *Correspondence: Toshihisa Tanaka Received: 27 January 2017 Accepted: 10 July 2017 Published: 26 July 2017 Citation: Kumagai Y, Arvaneh M and Tanaka T (2017) Familiarity Affects Entrainment of EEG in Music Listening. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 11:384. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00384 Keywords: music, entrainment, perception, electroencelphalogram (EEG), spectrum analysis 1. INTRODUCTION When listening to music, a human perceives beats, meters, rhythms, melodies, and so on. It has been reported that music perception involves emotion, syntactic processing, and motor system (Maess et al., 2001; Pereira et al., 2011; Koelsch et al., 2013). For example, Koelsch et al. (2013) observed brain connectivity between visual cortex and area seven of the superior parietal lobule when participants perceived auditory signals of danger. Maess et al. (2001) showed that brain areas involved in language syntactic analysis was activated during musical syntactic processing. Interestingly, Pereira et al. (2011) showed that passive listening to music in non-musicians led to motor cortex activation. Despite all these studies, the mechanism of music perception is still unclear. To understand auditory mechanism many researchers measure event-related potentials (ERPs) such as mismatch negativity (MMN) in numerous contexts in the music domain and in the speech domain. MMN is a change-specific component of ERP that has a peak at 150–250 ms after the onset of deviant stimulus (Näätänen et al., 1978). Some research studies have shown that MMNs are elicited by the deviant sound in rhythmic sequences (Lappe et al., 2013), melody (Virtala et al., 2014), and speech (Dehaene-Lambertz, 1997). Another approach in understanding Frontiers in Human Neuroscience | www.frontiersin.org 1 July 2017 | Volume 11 | Article 384 Kumagai et al. Familiarity Affects Music Entrainment auditory mechanism is to investigate auditory steady-state response (ASSR) which can be elicited by periodically repeated sounds (Lins and Picton, 1995). It has been reported that in speech perception domain amplitude-modulated speech could elicit ASSR (Lamminmäki et al., 2014). Interestingly, recent investigations in music perception domain have demonstrated that ASSR was evoked by periodic rhythm of music (Meltzer et al., 2015). However, the MMN and ASSR approaches are not suitable for stationary stimuli such as natural music. Recent works on speech perception have focused on phase entrainment (Ahissar et al., 2001; Luo and Poeppel, 2007; Aiken and Picton, 2008; Nourski et al., 2009; Ding and Simon, 2013, 2014; Doelling et al., 2014; Zoefel and VanRullen, 2015, 2016). Cortical entrainment to the envelope of speech has been investigated by using magnetoencephalogram (MEG) (Ahissar et al., 2001), electroencelphalogram (EEG) (Aiken and Picton, 2008), and electrocorticogram (ECoG) (Nourski et al., 2009). Many researchers reported that cortical entrainment was correlated with the speech intelligibility (Ahissar et al., 2001; Luo and Poeppel, 2007; Aiken and Picton, 2008; Ding and Simon, 2013; Doelling et al., 2014). Moreover, it has been suggested that intelligible speech could enhance the entrainment compared to unintelligible speech (Luo and Poeppel, 2007; Doelling et al., 2014; Zoefel and VanRullen, 2015). Thus, high-level factors of speech sound which reflect intelligibility could play an important role in cortical entrainment. In the music perception domain, cortical entrainment to periodic stimuli such as beat, meter, and rhythm has been observed in many studies (Fujioka et al., 2012; Nozaradan, 2014; Meltzer et al., 2015). Recently, it was demonstrated that cerebral cortex entrains to the music by using MEG (Doelling and Poeppel, 2015). Moreover, some researchers have investigated the relationship between entrainment and emotion while listening to music in different contexts (Trost et al., 2017). For instance, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) it has been shown that emotion and rhythm of music affect the entrainment (Trost et al., 2014). Since music includes complex features such as rhythm, melody, and harmony, the link between entrainment and high-level factors is still open to question. Music familiarity is an important high-level factor in music perception. There are many brain imaging studies focusing on brain regions activated by familiar music, such as (Satoh et al., 2006; Groussard et al., 2009; Pereira et al., 2011), however, they did not investigate entrainment. In EEG studies, it was shown that a deviant tone among a sequence of familiar tones enhanced MMN compared to that among a sequence of unfamiliar sounds (Jacobsen et al., 2005), and deviant chord among a sequence of familiar chord elicited a greater response than that among a sequence of unfamiliar chord (Brattico et al., 2001). Another study reported that the cerebral cortex responded more strongly to the periodic rhythm of unfamiliar music than to that of familiar music (Meltzer et al., 2015). Re (...truncated)