Representational dynamics of listened and imagined musical sound sequences
David Ricardo Quiroga‐Martinez, Leonardo Bonetti, Robert Thomas Knight, Peter Vuust · 2022 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience · 2022
Imagine a song you know by heart. With low effort you could play it vividly in your mind. However, little is known about how the brain represents and holds in mind such musical “thoughts”. Here, we leverage time-generalized decoding from MEG brain source activations to show that listened and imagined melodies are represented in auditory cortex, thalamus and middle cingulate cortex. Accuracy patterns reveal that during listening and imagining sounds are represented as a melodic group, while during listening they are also represented individually. Opposite brain activation patterns distinguish between melodies during listening compared to imagining. Our work sheds light on the representational dynamics of listened and imagined musical sound sequences.