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Music, Pitch Perception, and the Mechanisms of Cortical Hearing

  • Chapter
Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience

Abstract

The fact that mental functions are asymmetrically represented in the cerebral hemispheres of humans has been central to much of the study of the relationship between brain functions and behavior over the past 25 years. This fact, of course, was recognized much earlier, largely beginning with the observations of Broca and Wernicke that language disturbances were associated with left-hemisphere damage. Subsequently, similar arguments about the lateralization of function in the brain have also been made about such nonlanguage functions as music. Although the behavioral disturbances seen in the neurological syndromes of aphasia or amusia are not typically modality-specific, they have provided important eIues about where 10 beg in the study of how the brain processes linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory patterns. Because of the strong association between language and left-hemisphere function, a useful working assumption has been that the characteristics of the speech perception process are likely to be quite similar, if not identical, to the characteristics of cortical hearing in the left hemisphere. On the other side of the brain, however, the characteristics of cortical hearing are less weIl understood. This chapter, then, focuses on one of the processes underlying the right hemisphere’s purported musical skills. The eIues broadly suggested by the clinical syndromes and narrowed by experimental studies with both normal subjects and patients with focal brain damage are considered here. Based on this evidence, it is argued that one of the areas in which the right hemisphere has a relative advantage over the left is in processing steady-state harmonic information, and it does so in a manner that is important in extracting pitch information from complex periodic sounds. This capacity, then, is a significant contributor to the apparent right-hemisphere advantage for some musical functions, and almost certainly, it plays a role in the right hemisphere’s contribution to the prosody of fluent speech.

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  1. Department of Neurology, Division of Cognitive Neuroscience, Cornell University Medical College, New York, New York, 10021, USA

    John J. Sidtis

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  1. Cornell University Medical College, New York, New York, USA

    Michael S. Gazzaniga

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Sidtis, J.J. (1984). Music, Pitch Perception, and the Mechanisms of Cortical Hearing. In: Gazzaniga, M.S. (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2177-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2177-2_5

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