The present study aimed at identifying the brain regions which preferentially responded to music with medium degrees of key stability. There were three types of auditory stimuli. Diatonic music based strictly on major and minor scales has the highest key stability, whereas atonal music has the lowest key stability. Between these two extremes, chromatic music is characterized by sophisticated uses of out-of-key notes, which challenge the internal model of musical pitch and lead to higher precision-weighted prediction error compared to diatonic and atonal music. The brain activity of 29 adults with excellent relative pitch was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they listened to diatonic music, chromatic music, and atonal random note sequences. Several frontoparietal regions showed significantly greater response to chromatic music than to diatonic music and atonal sequences, including the pre-supplementary motor area (extending into the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, rostrolateral prefrontal cortex, intraparietal sulcus, and precuneus. We suggest that these frontoparietal regions may support working memory processes, hierarchical sequencing, and conflict resolution of remotely related harmonic elements during the predictive processing of chromatic music. This finding suggested a possible correlation between precision-weighted prediction error and the frontoparietal regions implicated in cognitive control.

本研究旨在确定优先响应中等稳定性键音乐的大脑区域。有三种类型的听觉刺激。全音阶的音乐上的主要和次要尺度严格依据具有最高的稳定性的关键，而无调性音乐具有最低键的稳定性。在这两个极端之间，半音音乐其特点是巧妙地使用了失调音符，与全音阶和无调音相比，这挑战了音高的内部模型，并导致更高的精度加权预测误差。通过功能磁共振成像，对29名相对音高出色的成年人的大脑活动进行了测量，同时他们听了全音速音乐，半音音乐和无调随机音符序列。几个额前区域对彩色音乐的反应比对全音速音乐和非音调序列的反应要大得多，包括补充运动前区（延伸到背侧扣带前皮质），背外侧前额叶皮层，后外侧前额叶皮层，顶叶内沟和前突。我们建议这些额顶区域可能支持工作记忆过程，分层排序，彩色音乐的预测处理过程中远程相关谐波元素的冲突和冲突解决。这一发现表明，精确加权的预测误差与牵涉认知控制的额顶区域之间可能存在相关性。