Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) Inter-subject Correlation using Continuous Music Stimuli

Music has existed throughout cultures for thousands of years and has been able to create powerful and intercultural connections between humans. Yet, early neurocognitive studies on music have utilized mainly artificial stimuli. Going towards more complex, real-world stimuli, this study examines magnetoencephalographic (MEG) brain responses to listening to continuous music in 24 musically trained and 19 untrained listeners. Three whole musical pieces of different genres were presented as stimuli. To investigate how similarly listeners’ brains process the music, inter-subject correlations (ISC) of the dynamics of specific MEG frequency bands were computed. This approach is a novel method for analyzing complex stimuli with MEG. Compared to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, it adds to the information about synchronous processing of continuous music stimuli in the brain. Our MEG results show that auditory processing areas, including middle and superior temporal gyri, transverse temporal cortex and insula with enhanced right hemispheric responses, synchronize across subjects. The extend of synchronization differs depending on the selected frequency band and music stimulus. For the song that elicited highest ISCs across subjects, in the 4–8 Hz and 8–12 Hz frequency bands, musicians exhibit higher synchrony in auditory processing areas compared to non-musicians. In summary, listening to real music induces brain-to-brain coupling especially in auditory cortices. Coupling in musicians during listening to a piece with a variety and complexity of musical features is higher compared to non-trained participants