Previous neuroimaging studies have shown an increased sensory cortical response (i.e., heightened weight on sensory evidence) under higher levels of predictive uncertainty. The signal enhancement theory proposes that attention improves the quality of the stimulus representation, and therefore reduces uncertainty by increasing the gain of the sensory signal. The present study employed functional...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have demonstrated functional and structural temporal lobe abnormalities located close to the auditory cortical regions in schizophrenia. The goal of this study was to determine whether functional abnormalities exist in the cortical processing of musical sound in schizophrenia. METHODS Twelve schizophrenic patients and twelve age- and sex-matched healthy controls we...

The author discusses three multiple testing procedures for identifying the minimum efficacious doses in a balanced factorial combination drug trial. All of these procedures utilize the closed testing principle, and hence strongly control the overall error rate and satisfy the coherence property, that is, if a hypothesis is retained then any hypothesis implied by it is also retained. While coher...

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired pitch processing. Although pitch simultaneities are among the fundamental building blocks of Western tonal music, affective responses to simultaneities such as isolated dyads varying in consonance/dissonance or chords varying in major/minor quality have rarely been studied in amusic individuals. Thirteen amusics and th...

The goal of this study was to analyze the time-course of sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) processes that govern musical harmonic expectancy. Eight-chord sequences were presented to 12 musicians and 12 nonmusicians. Expectations for the last chord were manipulated both at the sensory level (i.e., the last chord was sensory consonant or dissonant) and at the cognitive level (the harmo...

Consonant and dissonant pitch relationships in music provide the foundation of melody and harmony, the building blocks of Western tonal music. We hypothesized that phase-locked neural activity within the brainstem may preserve information relevant to these important perceptual attributes of music. To this end, we measured brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) from nonmusicians in respo...

Human listeners prefer consonant over dissonant musical intervals and the perceived contrast between these classes is reduced with cochlear hearing loss. Population-level activity of normal and impaired model auditory-nerve (AN) fibers was examined to determine (1) if peripheral auditory neurons exhibit correlates of consonance and dissonance and (2) if the reduced perceptual difference between...

one of the fields of creation and practice expansion is an attempt to diversify and multiply melodic modules which can increase practical potentials in a musical system. the most fundamental element of a sonic- musical atmosphere (mode) is ambits of tone; in other words, it is a sequence of tones with specific frequency. therefore, melodic modules combination depends on acoustical features and ...

how does a journalist or an editor decide which news is worthy and which is not? according to some media researchers, they refer to a set of news values. one of the best known lists of such news values have been supplied by johan galtung and marie h. ruge. an analytical discussion on news values always refers to this list, which initially intended to cover international events. these factors i...

In the Pacific Coast of Colombia there is a type of marimba called marimba de chonta, which provides the melodic and harmonic contour for traditional music with characteristic chants and dances. The tunings of this marimba are based on the voice of female singers and allows musical practices, as a transposition that preserves relative distances between bars. Here we show that traditional tuning...