Zatorre's Narrative Analysis

Robert J. Zatorre, Joyce L. Chang, and Virginia B. Penhune assert in their article “When the Brain Plays Music: Auditory–Motor Interactions in Music Perception and Productions,” that the premotor cortex (PMC) is involved in both direct and indirect auditory–motor interactions. To further understand the different parts of their assertion, they divide the PMC into two parts: ventral premotor cortex (vPMC) and dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC). According to their observations, the vPMC is involved in what they call “direct visuomotor transformations” (554). This means that the vPMC responds to actions as well as the observations of the actions. Listening to speech recruits motor speech regions such as the vPMC and the Brodmann area 44, which is often associated with syntactic processing. Zatorre et al. also assert that the experiments they ran show the need for the vPMC when playing a musical instrument. Besides this, they observed that the vPMC is active while listening to musical excerpts (551).
While the vPMC is more involved with direct interactions, the experiments conducted by Zatorre et al. show that the dPMC is involved in more indirect sensory–motor transformations (554). One of these indirect interactions is discernment of metrical beat and rhythm (550).
The conclusions—the premotor cortex is more involved in processing music than was thought—are based on the authors’ interpretations of the data they collected from string instrumentalists and pianists during the study. Although the authors offered different possible interpretations of the data collected, they were able to incorporate some of the other interpretations into their conclusion. This fact demonstrates the open–endedness of the data collected and the authors’ open minds to other