Impact of tonal and atonal music on brain: an fMRI study

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between music and emotion where distinct disciplines such as neurology, radiology and musicology were integrated. Ethnomusicology, which is my discipline, studies music in its cultural context. Impacts of tonal and atonal music on the brain were observed through the use of theoretical and methodological tools of neurology and musicology. The impacts were dealt with not only in terms of the activated parts of brain but also of emotions and culture. This study also examines the overlap between theoretical discourse and perception. Findings evaluated reveal that tonal and atonal musics are perceived by different parts of brain and left brain is more activated by atonal music. The study is one of the firsts in the literature to use music samples which are original works of western art music.In this study, fifteen right-handed female non-musician subjects aged 25-48 were made to listen to the Bach's concerto ?For Two Violins in D Minor? and Schönberg's "Five Pieces for Orchestra" as the tonal and atonal samples respectively during the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) registration and the brain activations were examined. The subjects were interviewed after the fMRI registration and asked to comment on the emotional connotations of the tonal and atonal musics they had listened to. The findings acquired in the interviews and the fMRI brain scans were compared. The images were analysed by SPM2 (Statistical Parametric Mapping) software.