Collaborator: Peter Pfordresher, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at San Antonio

Peter Pfordresher and I are engaged in a joint project to characterize the problems in pitch perception and pitch production underlying tone deafness as well as examine the neural correlates of these deficient skills using functional MRI.

Publication: Pfordresher, P. Q. and Brown, S. (2007). Poor-pitch singing in the absence of "tone deafness". Music Perception 25: 95-115.

Publication: Pfordresher, P. Q. and Brown, S. (Submitted). Linguistic background influences the production and perception of musical intervals.


The neural basis of stuttering

Functional MRI and meta-analysis are being used to investigate potential connectivity disturbances underlying stuttering.

Publication: Brown, S., Ingham, R. J., Ingham, J. C., Laird, A., and Fox, P.T. (2005). Stuttered and fluent speech production: An ALE meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies. Human Brain Mapping 25: 105-117


The song system of the human brain

The neural centers involved in the control of human singing were examined using PET with ten amateur musicians as subjects.

Publication: Brown, S., Martinez, M. J., Hodges, D. A., Fox, P. T. and Parsons, L. M. (2004). The song system of the human brain. Cognitive Brain Research 20: 363-375.


The neural basis of musical and speech generativity

Simple creative production of song and speech was examined using melody completion and sentence completion tasks, respectively, in a PET study with ten amateur musicians as subjects.

Publication: Brown, S., Martinez, M. J., and Parsons, L. M. (2006). Music and language side by side in the brain: A PET study of the generation of melodies and sentences. European Journal of Neuroscience 23: 2791-2803.


Musical and semantic discrimination

Same/different discrimination tasks were analyzed using pairs of either monophonic melodies, harmonized melodies, or sentences as stimuli. This was done using fMRI with ten amateur musicians as subjects.

Publication: Brown, S. and Martinez, M. J. (2007). Activation of premotor vocal areas during musical discrimination. Brain and Cognition 63: 59-69.


The biological foundations of dance

Patterned movement of the legs to the beat of music was examined using PET with ten amateur dancers as subjects. This is the first imaging study of human dance.

Publication: Brown, S., Martinez, M. J. and Parsons, L. M. (2006). The neural basis of human dance. Cerebral Cortex 16: 1157-1167.


Music and emotion

Passive listening to Greek music of the rembetika style was examined in this PET study.

Publication: Brown, S., Martinez, M. J. and Parsons, L. M. (2004). Passive music listening spontaneously engages limbic and paralimbic systems. Neuroreport 15: 2033-2037.


Cognitive Psychology Projects

Cognitive analysis of musical improvisation in non-musicians

We are currently engaged in a study of the generative musical skills of non-musicians. Ten tasks are being analyzed, the two most important ones being 1) melodic completion and 2) spontaneous composition of songs to presented verse texts.



Evolution and Ethology Projects

"Music as a mosaic": Music and animal song

Human musical capacity is a mosaic of auditory and vocal traits found throughout the animal kingdom. The current project is devoted to detailing this mosaic. As part of the project, we are subjecting a host of animal vocalizations, from a diversity of species, to musicological analysis, with regard to pitch, scale, rhythm and form.



Comparative Musicology Projects

Classification of the aboriginal musics of Taiwan

Collaborator: Jade Pai, University of British Columbia

We are analyzing the musics of the 10 tribal groups of Taiwan as a case study to develop a classification scheme for world musics.