Electrical brain activity associated with automatic and controlled processing of melodic contour and interval

Melodic information is thought to be encoded in the brain in two different forms, a contour code, consisting of the up/down pattern of pitch changes, and an interval code, consisting of the exact pitch distances.1 In both cases, the important melodic information lies more in the relative relation between tones than in the absolute pitch of the tones. Because the organization of auditory cortex appears to be tonotopic, it is interesting to ask at what stage of processing relational pitch information is extracted. A related question concerns the extent to which relational melodic contour and interval are automatically processed in the absence of focused attention. These two questions were investigated using event-related brain potentials (ERPs).