The Neural Mechanism Of Music Improvisation And Lyric Writing

Creativity is the source of a country’s technological progress and economic development,as well as the foundation for individuals to adapt to life and solve problems.Creative thinking is a key component of creativity,which is a unique high-level cognitive ability of humans.Its origin and cognitive neural mechanism have been puzzling researchers in multiple fields for decades.In the past twenty years,researchers have used different perspectives combined with brain imaging techniques to explore the mechanisms of creative thinking,greatly advancing our understanding of the nature of creativity.Previous neuroscience studies mainly focused on general creative tasks such as insight,divergent thinking,and creative problem solving.However,there have been relatively few studies on the creative mechanisms involving professional skills and knowledge,such as artistic creativity and scientific creativity.In addition,the current experimental research has mostly used tasks that extract and simplify human creative thinking activities in order to meet the requirements of capturing innovative ideas and data analysis,which reduces the ecological validity of creative observation.Artistic creativity is considered a specific form of creativity in the field,which is the ability of individuals to produce novel,unique,and aesthetically or artistically valuable products.Artistic creativity,such as musical improvisation,is mainly observed through long-duration tasks and real-time recording devices,providing an effective way to explore the complex dynamics of creative thinking processes in real-world scenarios.In addition,due to the advantages of strong temporal dynamics(i.e.,real-time dynamic output),high ecological validity,diverse expression forms,and quantifiability,musical creativity has become a highly regarded field in recent years.However,current music composition mainly focuses on musical improvisation,and there is little research on other forms of music composition.Based on this,this paper mainly investigates the neural activity patterns of two forms of musical improvisation,namely musical improvisation composition and improvisational lyrics,as well as the shared neural activity basis of the two music composition modes.Study 1 aims to investigate the dynamic brain activity patterns during music improvisation and the creative process using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology.Music improvisation is used as the experimental condition,while music recall is used as the control condition.Considering the influence of experience and knowledge on creativity in the field,two types of experimental materials with different levels of familiarity are used in the experimental conditions.First,the study examines the brain activation patterns during music improvisation(versus the recall condition),as well as the differences in brain activation and dynamic brain activity during the creative process between the two materials with different levels of familiarity.Secondly,Psycho Physiological Interactions(PPI)analysis is used to examine the changes in dynamic brain functional connectivity during the creative conditions.The behavioral results reveal significant differences in originality,aesthetic quality,and emotional richness between improvisations with familiar and unfamiliar materials.Improvisations with novel materials show higher originality and aesthetic quality but relatively lower emotional richness.The f MRI analysis results show that improvisations with familiar materials mainly activate bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and the left inferior parietal lobule,with the brain activation area shifting from the parietal lobe to the frontal lobe and then to the cerebellum over time.Improvisations with novel materials mainly activate the left inferior frontal gyrus,left precentral gyrus,left supplementary motor area,cerebellum,and other brain regions,with the brain activation gradually shifting from the parietal lobe to the cerebellum over time.Compared with familiar conditions,improvisations under novel conditions significantly activate the left cerebellum,right inferior temporal gyrus,and right superior parietal lobule.The PPI analysis results focusing on the inferior frontal gyrus reveal significant negative functional connectivity between the inferior frontal gyrus and the parietal lobe in the early stage of music improvisation,and significant positive functional connectivity between the inferior frontal gyrus,left insula,right temporal pole,and left middle temporal gyrus in the later stage of music improvisation.In addition,there is significant positive functional connectivity between the cerebellum and right orbitofrontal gyrus in the later stage of music improvisation.Overall,the study suggests that during music improvisation,the inferior parietal lobule is activated in the early stage,while the inferior frontal gyrus and insula in the lateral prefrontal cortex are activated in the middle stage.In the later stage,the cerebellum is widely involved in the process,reflecting the activation of knowledge related to skills and inhibition of idea processing in the early stage,the processing of emotions,value judgments,and self-evaluation in the middle stage,and the expression of skill performance such as motor simulation in the later stage.Study 2 investigated the brain activation patterns and dynamic brain activity patterns during music improvisation and lyric creation using f MRI.In this study,participants were required to create lyrics while watching and listening to a musical score in an MRI scanner.The experiment included two conditions,namely,improvisational lyric creation and retrospective lyric creation.The musical scores used in improvisational lyric creation were derived from the complete melody generated in Study 1.The f MRI results showed that compared to retrospective lyric creation,music improvisation primarily activated the left orbitofrontal gyrus,cerebellum,left supplementary motor area,left anterior cingulate gyrus,and right superior temporal gyrus.Over time,the early stage of music improvisation exhibited widespread brain activation,whereas the later stage was primarily characterized by positive activation in the right superior parietal lobule and negative activation in the left middle frontal gyrus.Using the supplementary motor area and cerebellum as seed regions for PPI analysis,the results showed that the supplementary motor area was significantly negatively functionally connected to the left superior parietal lobule in the early stage of music improvisation,while the cerebellum was significantly positively functionally connected to the left anterior cingulate gyrus in the middle stage of music improvisation.Overall,early activation of music lyric creation involved extensive brain activation,including occipital lobe,temporal lobe,frontal lobe,cerebellum,auxiliary motor area and so on,while the later stage of right superior parietal lobe activation mainly involved music imagination processing under the combination of lyrics and melody.Furthermore,from the perspective of task timing,the brain regions involved in music lyric creation and composition exhibited an inverted activation pattern,which may be attributed to the mirror neuron activity pattern induced by the need to understand the composer’s mental processing during lyric creation.Study 3 mainly investigates the shared activation patterns of music improvisation in both melody composition and lyric writing.Firstly,based on the previous two studies,two groups of participants were selected their co-activated brain regions(medial prefrontal cortex and cerebellum),were extracted activation values from the co-activated brain regions of the two groups,and were analyzed in relation to the creativity scores of their final works(including lyrics and melodies).The results showed a significant positive correlation between the similarity of the activation patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex and the creativity scores of the music improvisation in lyric writing,indicating that both melody composition and lyric writing rely on the core regions of the default network and reflect that understanding the similarity of creative themes is conducive to producing more creative works.In summary,this paper explores the brain activation and dynamic processing patterns of music improvisation through two forms of music creation,melody composition and lyric writing.The study found that the main brain regions involved in music creation include the inferior frontal gyrus,the supplementary motor area,the occipital lobe,and the cerebellum.Among them,the inferior frontal gyrus,supplementary motor area,and cerebellum are classical brain regions that are activated during artistic creativity(including music improvisation),indicating that both melody composition and lyric writing are forms of artistic creativity.The activation of the Superior occipital gyrus and Inferior occipital lobe indicates that music composition and lyric writing involve domain-specific processing such as visual imagination and imagery.In addition,the higher the similarity in activation patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex between music improvisation in melody composition and lyric writing,the higher the degree of innovation in the collaborative work,indicating that collaborative music creation to some extent depends on a common understanding of creative themes.In conclusion,this paper not only enriches the findings of the creative brain mechanisms,but also provides new methods and ideas for the study of music creativity.