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Sensitivity to musical structure in the human brain . Evidence from brain-damaged patients suggests that regions in the temporal lobes , distinct from those engaged in lower-level auditory analysis , process the pitch and rhythmic structure in music . In contrast , neuroimaging studies targeting the representation of music structure have primarily implicated regions in the inferior frontal cortices . Combining individual-subject fMRI analyses with a scrambling method that manipulated musical structure , we provide evidence of brain regions sensitive to musical structure bilaterally in the temporal lobes , thus reconciling the neuroimaging and patient findings . We further show that these regions are sensitive to the scrambling of both pitch and rhythmic structure but are insensitive to high-level linguistic structure . Our results suggest the existence of brain regions with representations of musical structure that are distinct from high-level linguistic representations and lower-level acoustic representations . These regions provide targets for future research investigating possible neural specialization for music or its associated mental processes .
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Intervention_Other
individual-subject fMRI analyses
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Outcome_Physical
brain regions sensitive to musical structure
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Outcome_Other
scrambling of both pitch and rhythmic structure
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Outcome_Other
high-level linguistic structure
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Outcome_Other
representations of musical structure
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Participant_Condition
brain-damaged