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Musicians’ memories in sound
During my PhD I became interested in how musicians are able to ‘filter out’ sounds during a performance – to listen to other players at the same time as focus on their own sound. I also read an article that suggested musicians are able to perform a similar feat when they are memorising music – background sound did not seem to have as disruptive an effect as we might expect to see when performing a memory tas. The irrelevant sound effect is a fairly robust memory phenomenon that has been used numerous times in research as a model for how our memories encode and process different sounds. One issue that…
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Music and Language syntax
“Musical syntax is processed in Broca’s area” (Maess et al., 2001) A new article in press in Cortex investigates the role of traditionally associated language syntax processing areas of the brain, namely Broca’s area (inferior Brodman area 44), in the processing of musical sounds. The EEG study was conducted by Sammler, Koelsch and Friederici (2010) and aimed to investigate brain activity associated with the presentation of musical sequences in patients with lesions in left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s area) * (the authors also looked at activation in patients with lesions in anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG) but I’m not going to go into detail about that area here for the…