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How regularities in sound sequences inform action planning: Neural and behavioral evidence from silent piano performance

1. Background It is known that knowledge of regularities can intuitively be used to flexibly generate appropriate actions depending on the demands of the current context [1,2]. While considerable effort in perception research has focused on how the brain represents regularities extracted from sequential acoustic signals, including speech and music, little is known about how the brain uses this knowledge of regularities to produce sequential coherent outputs (e.g. talking or playing an instrument). Music production offers an ideal example to study how the brain achieves this. Western tonal music is endowed with a complex system of rules which defines structurally fundamental events in a sequence (Fig. 1). For example, based on harmony, a sequence starts and ends with a reference chord to which only some chords are expected to move to, whereas others rarely do [3]. Such harmonic regularities can thus be extracted across repeated perceptual exposure throughout life span [4,5], and used to anticipate, with a certain degree of abstractness, what chord is likely to come in a musical sequence [6,7]. Crucially, musicians are exposed to musical regularities not only through sounds, but also through motor practice. This led to the hypothesis that the sensorimotor associations formed through musical training in the musicians’ brain [8] may allow the generation of equivalent sensory and motor predictions about the next chord in a sequence [9]. The ability to represent anticipated musical events in both auditory and motor format may be a key step during training to detach from execution of fixed sequential movements towards flexible production of structurally coherent sequences, as in jazz improvisation or other forms of communication.