Abstract
The field of Cognitive Neuroscience is witnessing a shift in neuroimaging (fMRI) contexts towards more naturalistic settings and ecological stimuli from hitherto controlled counterparts. Music listening being an active process requires a dynamic setting in order to study time-varying and interactive underlying perceptual processes. I will present our most recent study that aims at unraveling the underlying neural mechanisms involved in the processing of musical beat salience in a dynamical naturalistic setting. The results of this study demonstrated a partial dissociation of functional networks belonging to the cerebello-thalamo-striato-cortical motor pathway wherein the cerebello-thalamo-striato segment plays a more significant role in beat maintenance while the cortical motor regions are key in beat inference. I will also present ongoing neuroscience-related work (in the naturalistic paradigm) related to individual difference-modulated global network connectivity during music listening, and musical-expertise modulated dynamic processing of musical features and emotions. Finally, I will end with a brief description of ongoing research work in the areas of music and well-being and Music Information Retrieval in the context of identifying risk for depression via music listening habits.
References related to the presentation:
- Toiviainen, P., Burunat, I., Brattico, E., Vuust, P., Alluri, V. (2019) The chronnectome of musical beat. Neuroimage.
- Niranjan,D., Toiviainen, P., Brattico, B., and Alluri, V. (2019) Dynamic Functional Connectivity in the Musical Brain. In The 12th International Conference on Brain Informatics, Hainan, China. Poster.
- Niranjan,D., Burunat, I., Toiviainen, P., Brattico, B., and Alluri, V. (2019) Influence of Musical Expertise on the processing of Musical Features in a Naturalistic Setting. Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience 2019. Poster.
- Agarwal, R., Singh, R., Saarikallio, S., McFerran, K, and Alluri, V. (2019) Mining Mental States using Music Associations. In Speech, Music, and Mind with Audio Satellite Workshop, Interspeech 2019. Presentation.
Bio
Dr. Vinoo Alluri is an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Lab at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-H), Hyderabad. She has a background in engineering (B.E, Electronics and Communication) with a focus on music technology (M.Sc, Music Engineering Technology) and a PhD in Musicology. Her work has primarily revolved around investigating dynamics of music processing in the brain in the naturalistic paradigm. She has published in several international journals such as Neuroimage, Human Brain Mapping, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Psychomusicology: Music, Mind and Brain, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, and Music Perception, among others. Her current focus in neuroscience is to investigate how individual differences (musical expertise, personality, and empathy) modulate brain connectivity while listening to music. On the behavioural- and MIR front, she is currently investigating the link between music listening habits and risk for depression.