This work explores the cerebral structures involved in the operations. We found activations preferentially in the left hemisphere for familiarity, pitch tasks and rhythm, and in appreciation of music. We studied six young healthy subjects (right handed, French, without musical talent), using a high the right hemisphere for the timbre task. The familiarity task activated the left inferior frontal gyrus, Brodmann area (BA) resolution PET device (CTI 953B) and 15 O-labelled water. In three tasks,

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... e studied the effects of selective attention to 47, and superior temporal gyrus (in its anterior part, BA 22). These activations presumably represent lexico-semantic pitch, timbre and rhythm; a final task studied semantic familiarity with tunes (considered as divided attention for access to melodic representations. In the pitch task, activations were observed in the left cuneus/precuneus (BA pitch and rhythm). These four tasks were performed on the same material (a tape consisting of 30 randomly arranged 18/19). These results were unexpected and we interpret them as reflecting a visual mental imagery strategy employed to sequences of notes). We selected a paradigm, without a reference task, to compare the activations produced by carry out this task. The rhythm task activated left inferior Broca's area (BA 44/6), with extention into the neighbouring attention to different parameters of the same stimulus. We expected that the activations recorded during each task insula, suggesting a role for this cerebral region in the processing of sequential sounds. would differ according to the differences in cognitive