Abstract

The paper presents fMRI results from experiments of subjects listening to musical stimuli. In this study we examine the neural correlates of tonality by presenting a set of stimuli with key changes of different distances along the circle-of-fifths, along with atonal control stimuli. Results are presented using both conventional statistical analysis across subjects, together with experiments using support vector machines. We find that a number of areas are significantly more active for tonal than
atonal processing, and further that the response is significantly stronger in some of these areas for more distant key changes.