Changes in Brain Responses to Music and Non-music Sounds Following Creativity Training Within the “Different Hearing” Program

Frontiers in Neuroscience

Jan Valošek¹  Markéta Trnečková²  Gabriela Coufalová³  Vít Zouhar³  Gabriela Všetičková³  Jaromír Synek³  Pavel Hok⁴  Petr Hluštík⁴  Anna Arkhipova⁴ 

[1] Department of Biomedical Engineering, University Hospital Olomouc, Olomouc, Czechia;Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Palacký University Olomouc, Olomouc, Czechia;Department of Music Education, Faculty of Education, Palacký University Olomouc, Olomouc, Czechia;Department of Neurology, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry and University Hospital Olomouc, Olomouc, Czechia;

关键词: creativity;    brain plasticity;    music training;    task-related fMRI;    auditory perception;    music composition;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnins.2021.703620

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The “Different Hearing” program (DHP) is an educational activity aimed at stimulating musical creativity of children and adults by group composing in the classroom, alternative to the mainstream model of music education in Czechia. Composing in the classroom in the DHP context does not use traditional musical instruments or notation, instead, the participants use their bodies, sounds originating from common objects as well as environmental sounds as the “elements” for music composition by the participants’ team, with the teacher initiating and then participating and coordinating the creative process, which ends with writing down a graphical score and then performing the composition in front of an audience. The DHP methodology works with a wide definition of musical composition. We hypothesized that the DHP short-term (2 days) intense workshop would induce changes in subjective appreciation of different classes of music and sound (including typical samples of music composed in the DHP course), as well as plastic changes of the brain systems engaged in creative thinking and music perception, in their response to diverse auditory stimuli. In our study, 22 healthy university students participated in the workshop over 2 days and underwent fMRI examinations before and after the workshop, meanwhile 24 students were also scanned twice as a control group. During fMRI, each subject was listening to musical and non-musical sound samples, indicating their esthetic impression with a button press after each sample. As a result, participants’ favorable feelings toward non-musical sound samples were significantly increased only in the active group. fMRI data analyzed using ANOVA with post hoc ROI analysis showed significant group-by-time interaction (opposing trends in the two groups) in the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, which are functional hubs of the default mode network (DMN) and in parts of the executive, motor, and auditory networks. The findings suggest that DHP training modified the behavioral and brain response to diverse sound samples, differentially changing the engagement of functional networks known to be related to creative thinking, namely, increasing DMN activation and decreasing activation of the executive network.

【 授权许可】

Unknown