Music on the Mind: From Models to Memories

Music comprises the many ways in which sound is organized to support pleasurable experiences. Most of the music we experience on a daily basis is western tonal music, which has various levels of organization that humans learn about through implicit learning mechanisms. In this talk I will describe a model in which the audio that study participants hear is projected through a series of representational spaces that are used to model the melodic and harmonic expectations of listeners that have been measured behaviorally (using response times) in a large number of priming studies. I will then illustrate how modeling the time-varying trajectories of music in tonal space (the representational level that captures the musical and psychological distances between the 24 major and minor keys of western tonal music) serves to identify brain areas that couple with pieces of music as listeners perform perceptual tasks or experience music-evoked memories and emotions.

This event is open to the public.