arrangement of neurons which retrieve the same information when activated by the environment. By constantly referencing information and additional stimulation from the environment, the brain constructs musical features into a perceptual whole. The medial prefrontal cortex – one of the last areas affected by Alzheimer’s disease – is the region activated by music. Cognitive mechanisms To understand music pattern recognition, we need to understand the underlying cognitive systems that each handle a part of this process. Various activities are at work in this recognition of a piece of music and its patterns. Researchers have begun to unveil the reasons behind the stimulated reactions to music. Montreal-based researchers asked ten volunteers who got "chills" listening to music to listen to their favorite songs while their brain activity was being monitored. The results show the significant role of the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) region – involved with cognitive processes such as motivation, reward, addiction, etc. – creating the neural arrangements that make up the experience. A sense of reward prediction is created by anticipation before the climax of the tune, which comes to a sense of resolution when the climax is reached. The longer the listener is denied the expected pattern, the greater the emotional arousal when the pattern returns. Musicologist Leonard Meyer used fifty measures of Beethoven’s 5th movement of the String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 to examine this notion. The stronger this experience is, the more vivid memory it will create and store. This strength affects the speed and accuracy of retrieval and recognition of the musical pattern. The brain not only recognizes specific tunes, it distinguishes standard acoustic features, speech and music. MIT researchers conducted a study to examine this notion. The results showed six neural clusters in the auditory cortex responding to the sounds. Four were triggered when hearing standard acoustic features, one specifically responded to speech, and the last exclusively responded to music. Researchers who studied the correlation between temporal evolution of timbral, tonal and rhythmic features of music, came to the conclusion that music engages the brain regions connected to motor actions, emotions and creativity. The research indicates that the whole brain "lights up" when listening to music. This amount of activity boosts memory preservation, hence pattern recognition. Recognizing patterns of music is different for a musician and a listener. Although a musician may play the same notes every time, the details of the frequency