This talk explores how brains learn unfamiliar musical structures using the Bohlen-Pierce scale—a tritave-based tuning system—as a culturally neutral research paradigm. By studying learners , this work reveals fundamental mechanisms of musical enculturation and lowers barriers to understanding how anyone can develop musical fluency.
Through EEG, MRI, and behavioral studies, I demonstrate that humans can rapidly learn to predict musical structure, and that liking emerges from learned predictions. Neural signatures reveal hierarchical predictive processing as the brain builds new expectations, with timbre serving as crucial scaffolding for learning novel pitch structures. Individual differences in musical training, amusia, and musical anhedonia illuminate dissociable systems underlying prediction versus reward. I extend these findings to understanding creativity and health applications, including studies in musical improvisation and imagination, attention enhancement in ADHD, and gamma-frequency stimulation for cognitive health in aging. Together these results illustrate how alternative tuning systems advance music technology to serve human health and creativity.
