The Neural Basis of Tonal Processing in Music: An ALE Meta-Analysis

Music is used as an important medium for communication in human societies, often times to enhance the emotional meaning of narrative scenarios and ritual events. Music has a number of domain-specific tonal devices for doing this, spanning from scale structure to harmonic progressions and beyond. In order to explore the neural basis of tonal processing in music, we carried out an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of 20 published functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of tonal cognition, with an emphasis on harmony processing. The most concordant areas of activation across these studies occurred at the junction of the inferior frontal gyrus, anterior insula, and orbitofrontal cortex in Brodmann areas 47 and 13 in the right hemisphere. This region is associated not only with emotion in general, but with the conveyance of affective meanings during communication processes, including speech prosody and music.