Cognitive neuroscience of music

The cognitive neuroscience of music is the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes underlying music. These behaviours include music listening, performing, composing, reading, writing, and ancillary activities. It also is increasingly concerned with the brain basis for musical aesthetics and musical emotion. Scientists working in this field may have training in cognitive neuroscience, neurology, neuroanatomy, psychology, music theory, computer science, and other relevant fields.

The cognitive neuroscience of music represents a significant branch of music psychology, and is distinguished from related fields such as cognitive musicology in its reliance on direct observations of the brain and use of such techniques as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), and positron emission tomography (PET).

Successive parts of the tonotopically organized basilar membrane in the cochlea resonate to corresponding frequency bandwidths of incoming sound. The hair cells in the cochlea release neurotransmitter as a result, causing action potentials down the auditory nerve. The auditory nerve then leads to several layers of synapses at numerous nuclei in the auditory brainstem. These nuclei are also tonotopically organized, and the process of achieving this tonotopy after the cochlea is not well understood. This tonotopy is in general maintained up to primary auditory cortex in mammals, however it is often found that cells in primary and non-primary auditory cortex have spatio-temporal receptive fields, rather than being strictly responsive or phase-locking their action potentials to narrow frequency regions.