Abstract
It has been reported that performing actions such as beat tracking or imagining while listening to music gives us more pleasure than simply listening to music without performing such actions. We performed EEG measurements to investigate how information is processed in the brain during three scenarios: (1) only listening to music, (2) imagining the music without listening to it, and (3) simultaneously listening to and imagining the music. We used both known and unknown musical pieces. Results showed that, for known music, the visual cortices are activated when imagining and listening to music. For unknown music, however, although the visual cortices are also activated when imagining the music with and without listening to it, the frontal and auditory cortices are more dominantly activated. This result is similar to the brain activity while beat tracking and is expected to lead to clarification of the reason for pleasure of performing music.
