Toward a neural basis of music perception – a review and updated model
- Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion”, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Music perception involves acoustic analysis, auditory memory, auditory scene analysis, processing of interval relations, of musical syntax and semantics, and activation of (pre)motor representations of actions. Moreover, music perception potentially elicits emotions, thus giving rise to the modulation of emotional effector systems such as the subjective feeling system, the autonomic nervous system, the hormonal, and the immune system. Building on a previous article (Koelsch and Siebel, 2005), this review presents an updated model of music perception and its neural correlates. The article describes processes involved in music perception, and reports EEG and fMRI studies that inform about the time course of these processes, as well as about where in the brain these processes might be located.
Keywords: music, brain, fMRI, EEG, ERAN, semantics
Citation: Koelsch S (2011) Toward a neural basis of music perception – a review and updated model. Front. Psychology 2:110. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00110
Received: 13 March 2011;
Paper pending published: 14 April 2011;
Accepted: 13 May 2011;
Published online: 09 June 2011.
Edited by:
Lutz Jäncke, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Copyright: © 2011 Koelsch. This is an open-access article subject to a non-exclusive license between the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and other Frontiers conditions are complied with.
*Correspondence: Stefan Koelsch, Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion”, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany. e-mail: koelsch@cbs.mpg.de