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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on September 29, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp199
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

A Role for the Intraparietal Sulcus in Transforming Musical Pitch Information

Nicholas E. V. Foster1,2 and Robert J. Zatorre1,2

1 Department of Neuropsychology, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montréal, Québec H3A 2B4, Canada, 2 International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7, Canada

Address correspondence to Nicholas E. V. Foster, Montreal Neurological Institute, Room 276, 3801 University Street, Montreal, Québec H3A 2B4, Canada. Email: foster+47{at}bic.mni.mcgill.ca.

The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigates the neural substrates of relative pitch. Musicians and nonmusicians performed 2 same/different discrimination tasks (simple and transposed melody) that differed in whether they required precise encoding and comparison of relative pitch structure, along with 2 control tasks (rhythm and phoneme). The transposed melody task involved a musical transposition of 4 semitones between the target and comparison patterns, requiring listeners to use interval information rather than the absolute value of the individual pitches. Contrasting the transposed melody to the simple melody condition revealed greater activation in the cortex within the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) bilaterally; control tasks did not elicit significant activity in the IPS. Moreover, a whole-brain voxel-wise regression analysis of brain oxygenation level–dependent signal showed that activity within the right IPS predicted task performance for both musicians and nonmusicians specifically in the transposed melody condition. Successful performance of the transposed melody task requires encoding and comparison of auditory patterns having different tonal reference points—thus simple tonal memory is not sufficient. Our results point to a role for the IPS in transforming high-level auditory information. We suggest that this area may support a general capacity for transformation and comparison of systematically related stimulus attributes.

Key Words: auditory • fMRI • music • parietal lobes • relative pitch


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