The brain activity of multiple subjects has been shown to synchronize during salient moments of natural stimuli, suggesting that correlation of neural responses indexes a brain state operationally termed 'engagement'. While past electroencephalography (EEG) studies have considered both auditory and visual stimuli, the extent to which these results generalize to music-a temporally structured stimulus for which the brain has evolved specialized circuitry-is less understood. Here we investigated neural correlation during natural music listening by recording EEG responses from N=48 adult listeners as they heard real-world musical works, some of which were temporally disrupted through shuffling of short-term segments (measures), reversal, or randomization of phase spectra. We measured correlation between multiple neural responses (inter-subject correlation) and between neural responses and stimulus envelope fluctuations (stimulus-response correlation) in the time and frequency domains. Stimuli retaining basic musical features, such as rhythm and melody, elicited significantly higher behavioral ratings and neural correlation than did phase-scrambled controls. However, while unedited songs were self-reported as most pleasant, time-domain correlations were highest during measure-shuffled versions. Frequency-domain measures of correlation (coherence) peaked at frequencies related to the musical beat, although the magnitudes of these spectral peaks did not explain the observed temporal correlations. Our findings show that natural music evokes significant inter-subject and stimulus-response correlations, and suggest that the neural correlates of musical 'engagement' may be distinct from those of enjoyment.

中文翻译：

---

自然音乐唤起反映时间结构和节拍的相关脑电图反应

多个受试者的大脑活动已被证明在自然刺激的显着时刻同步，这表明神经反应的相关性表明大脑状态在操作上称为“参与”。虽然过去的脑电图 (EEG) 研究考虑了听觉和视觉刺激，但这些结果在多大程度上推广到音乐——大脑已经进化出专门的电路的时间结构刺激——却鲜为人知。在这里，我们通过记录 N=48 成年听众听到真实世界音乐作品时的 EEG 响应来调查自然音乐聆听过程中的神经相关性，其中一些通过短期片段（度量）的改组、反转或随机化在时间上被打乱相谱。我们测量了时域和频域中多个神经反应之间的相关性（受试者间相关性）以及神经反应和刺激包络波动（刺激-反应相关性）之间的相关性。保留基本音乐特征（如节奏和旋律）的刺激引起的行为评分和神经相关性显着高于相位扰乱控制。然而，虽然未经编辑的歌曲被自我报告为最令人愉快的，但在测量混洗版本中时域相关性最高。相关性（相干性）的频域测量在与音乐节拍相关的频率处达到峰值，尽管这些频谱峰值的幅度并不能解释观察到的时间相关性。我们的研究结果表明，自然音乐唤起了显着的主体间和刺激-反应相关性，