Our previous work (Casey, Thompson, Kang, Raizada, and Wheatley 2012) investigated decoding hemodynamic brain activity in the feed-forward pathways involved in music listening with rich stimuli. Our current work investigates top-down music processing via auditory imagery with an imagined music task. Most previous work on auditory imagery (e.g. Zatorre 2000; Zatorre, Halpern, and Bouffard 2010) used familiar tunes, such as nursery rhymes, that have associated lyrics which elicit activation of language areas in the brain.
