EEG Aspects of Musical Thinking: listening,imagining and composing

The main aim of this contribution was to demonstrate a way of objectifying various aspects of musical thinking by analysing the continuously running EEG. In this respect, the determination of coherence between the brain‐electric activities at all possible recording sites (i.e., 171, for the 19 electrodes we use), together with power at these sites proved to be a useful method. For data reduction, only statistically significant differences between resting periods (usually 1 min) and periods of musical thinking were considered. This procedure was performed for each of six frequency bands between 1 and 31.5 Hz. The results of both group and individual experiments are reported.

In group studies, listening to music involved mainly the temporal regions of both hemispheres, yet in different frequency ranges. The results proved to be specific and clearly differed from those obtained during tasks involving mental arithmetic, silent reading, listening to text and others. Moreover, musically trained subjects produced more increases of coherence than the untrained.

While imagining music, usually more coherence increases (i.e., higher cortico‐cortical co‐operation) were found. The same is true of composing, which was found to be different from both previously mentioned manners of musical thinking and in which usually the highest degrees of cortico‐cortical co‐operation within and between the hemispheres were found. While composing, the uppermost beta band was the most involved. One sample illustrates the manner of representing the results.

It is hypothesized that coherence reflects—to some extent—’differential attention’, aconditio sine qua non for conscious experience.