Toward a Neural Basis of Music Perception – A Review and Updated Model

Music perception involves acoustic analysis, auditory memory, auditory scene analysis, processing of interval relations, of musical syntax and semantics, and activation of (pre)motor representations of actions. Moreover, music perception potentially elicits emotions, thus giving rise to the modulation of emotional effector systems such as the subjective feeling system, the autonomic nervous system, the hormonal, and the immune system. Building on a previous article (Koelsch and Siebel, 2005), this review presents an updated model of music perception and its neural correlates. The article describes processes involved in music perception, and reports EEG and fMRI studies that inform about the time course of these processes, as well as about where in the brain these processes might be located.