RESEARCH ARTICLE Cortical encoding of melodic expectations in human temporal cortex Giovanni M Di Liberto1*, Claire Pelofi2,3†, Roberta Bianco4†, Prachi Patel5,6, Ashesh D Mehta7,8, Jose L Herrero7,8, Alain de Cheveigne´ 1,4, Shihab Shamma1,9*, Nima Mesgarani5,6* 1Laboratoire des syste`mes perceptifs, De´partement d’e´tudes cognitives, E´ cole normale supe´rieure, PSL University, CNRS, 75005 Paris, France; 2Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, United States; 3Institut de Neurosciences des Syste`me, UMR S 1106, INSERM, Aix Marseille Universite´, Marseille, France; 4UCL Ear Institute, London, United Kingdom; 5Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, United States; 6Mortimer B Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University, New York, United States; 7Department of Neurosurgery, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/ Northwell, Manhasset, United States; 8Feinstein Institute of Medical Research, Northwell Health, Manhasset, United States; 9Institute for Systems Research, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, United States Abstract Humans engagement in music rests on underlying elements such as the listeners’ cultural background and interest in music. These factors modulate how listeners anticipate musical events, a process inducing instantaneous neural responses as the music confronts these *For correspondence: expectations. Measuring such neural correlates would represent a direct window into high-level
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[email protected] (NM) assessed the relative contributions of acoustic versus melodic components of the music to the neural signal. Melodic features included information on pitch progressions and their tempo, which † These authors contributed were extracted from a predictive model of musical structure based on Markov chains.