FMRI measurement of brain activities to major and minor chords and cadence sequences

Abstract

Brain activities to major and minor chords and to major and minor cadence sequences were measured by sparse scanning fMRI. Areas activated by major and minor chords and cadence sequences were examined. Some of them are known to be related to emotion, motivation, arousal or reward. In general, minor chords activated larger areas of brain regions than major chords. Some activated areas have not been especially associated with emotion or music processing. Cadence results are somewhat ambiguous probably due to the control sequence used. Also individual differences were considerable in both experiments © 2010 IEEE.