Consistent with previous findings (Joris et al., 2004), we hypothesized that the presence of spectro-temporal modulations in the Spectrally-Rotated condition would drive consistent responses in auditory midbrain, thalamus and primary cortex while the absence of temporal modulations in the Phase-Scrambled condition would yield reduced ISS results in these structures. Importantly, we hypothesized learn more that only the Natural Music condition would elicit ISS beyond primary sensory cortices into motor planning and fronto-parietal cortices,

which underlie rhythmic (Chen et al., 2008) and attentional processing (Sridharan et al., 2007) of musical stimuli, respectively. The Stanford University School of Medicine Human Subjects committee approved the study, and informed consent was obtained from all participants. Seventeen right-handed subjects (nine males) between the ages of 19 and 27 years (mean = 21.3, SD = 1.78)

with little or no musical training according to previously published Proteases inhibitor criteria (Maess et al., 2001) served as participants. The participants received $50 in compensation for participation. Stimuli consisted of four symphonies of the late-baroque period composer William Boyce. Recordings were digitized at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz in 16-bit mono. The total duration for these symphonies was 9 min 35 s. These particular symphonies were chosen for this study as they are representative of the Western music tradition yet they were unlikely to be recognized by the participants, thereby avoiding familiarity and memory-related effects. The four symphonies contained ten

movement boundaries which were removed in order to ensure that event transitions were Morin Hydrate not driving ISS. To remove the movement boundaries, we first plotted each movement in Matlab and visually identified when the final note of the movement descended into the noise floor of the recording. All subsequent samples beyond this point were removed from the movement. We evaluated each movement boundary removal by listening to the manipulated stimuli and ensuring that the final note of each movement was completely audible and decayed naturally. All silent samples at the beginning of each movement were removed using the same visual and auditory-guided procedures. The result of this manipulation was a seamless transition from movement to movement that lacked the relatively long periods of silence (~5 s) that characterize natural movement boundaries. The task was programmed with E-Prime (PSTNET, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; www.pstnet.