• Subscribe
  • Sök
  • Home
  • Lectures and Symposiums
    • Interviews with our guests
    • Previous lectures
    • Brain and Culture symposium III 2019
    • Brain and Culture symposium II 2017
    • Brain and Culture Symposium 1 2016
  • Research
    • Research overview
    • Researcher’s Forum
    • Research Publications
    • Applications
    • Research of interest outside the Centre
  • Collaborators
  • The Lottie Wiking Foundation
    • The Lottie Wiking Foundation
    • How to make a donation
  • About us
    • The Cultural Brain Initiative
    • The Centre for Culture, Cognition and Health
    • The Cultural Brain
    • Contact us
  • Svenska
  • English
  • Subscribe
  • Sök

Sök

Browse:

  • Home
  • Nyheter
  • Culture and Cognition
  • The role of the brain as a prediction machine when listening to musical phrases
2021-10-04
Culture and Cognition Culture and Health
0

The role of the brain as a prediction machine when listening to musical phrases

A new study from Aarhus University in Denmark sheds new light on the brain’s capacity to predict musical phrases. Assistant Professor and AIAS fellow Niels Chr. Hansen documents that research participants experience musical phrases in a similar way to spoken sentences. The prediction process occurs when the musical phrase ends with a tone that suggests which notes will follow - and the brain saves these completed phrases in its memory for future predictive use.

According to Niels Chr. Hansen, a fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies who is also affiliated with the Center for Music in the Brain, the brain is constantly predicting what is about to happen while listening to musical phrases, and this challenges the previously held assumption that we experience that a musical phrases has ended only after a new phrase has begun. “We only know a little about how the brain finds out where the boundaries are over time – i.e. when things start and end – and here music provides a perfectly delimited domain to measure something that is otherwise difficult to measure, namely uncertainty,” says Niels Chr. Hansen.

The Brain Is a Prediction Machine, and Music Reveals How It Works

More research from the Centre for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University


Research publication

Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception
Niels Chr Hansen , Haley E Kragness , Peter Vuust , Laurel Trainor, Marcus T Pearce
Psychol Sci 2021 Sep;32(9):1416-1425.

Relaterade nyheter

  • In focus: The Music in Human and Social Development Research Group at the University of Edinburgh
  • Fredrik Ullén awarded the KI Culture Prize 2022
  • Arts and Public Health — Daisy Fancourt video interview

Recent Posts

  • Brain and Culture Lecture Thursday 30th March with Reyna Gordon, Vanderbilt University – A Genomic Journey to Individual Differences in Rhythm
  • Wednesday 29th March Piano Concert “Musical Vertigo” with Fredrik Ullén from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
  • Does the amount of time you spend in school improve your intelligence, or are other factors more important?
  • Why Should I Learn Music? It Can Be Good for Your Brain!
  • Danish study on music and sleep: here are the best songs to fall asleep to

Centrum för Kultur, Kognition & Hälsa i samarbete med