Article ID: 2008br
The early right anterior negativity (ERAN) is an event-related potential occurring when a chord in Western tonal music deviates from the tonal context, which is considered to reflect syntactic processing of music. A recent study reported that the ERAN was enhanced when pitch deviance occurred in a part of the main melody, rather than other parts. However, it remains unclear whether this effect was caused by deviance in the main melody or the treble voice because only a soprano voice was used as the main melody. We used a bass melody in the current study and compared the ERAN amplitudes between bass-deviant and soprano-deviant chords. The results indicated that a larger ERAN was elicited by a chord with soprano-voice deviance than a chord with bass-voice deviance, suggesting that in syntactic processing of music, the treble voice effect is dominant than the melody effect.
