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 …