text: Tonality is represented in more places than just the auditory cortex; one other specific area is the rostromedial prefrontal cortex (RMPFC). A study explored the areas of the brain which were active during tonality processing, using fMRI. The results of this experiment showed preferential blood-oxygen-level-dependent activation of specific voxels in RMPFC for specific tonal arrangements. Though these collections of voxels do not represent the same tonal arrangements between subjects or within subjects over multiple trials, it is interesting and informative that RMPFC, an area not usually associated with audition, seems to code for immediate tonal arrangements in this respect. RMPFC is a subsection of the medial prefrontal cortex, which projects to many diverse areas including the amygdala, and is thought to aid in the inhibition of negative emotion.
  Another study has suggested that people who experience 'chills' while listening to music have a higher volume of fibres connecting their auditory cortex to areas associated with emotional processing.
  In a study involving dichotic listening to speech, in which one message is presented to the right ear and another to the left, it was found that the participants chose letters with stops (e.g. 'p', 't', 'k', 'b') far more often when presented to the right ear than the left. However, when presented with phonemic sounds of longer duration, such as vowels, the participants did not favor any particular ear. Due to the contralateral nature of the auditory system, the right ear is connected to Wernicke's area, located within the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the left cerebral hemisphere.
  Sounds entering the auditory cortex are treated differently depending on whether or not they register as speech. When people listen to speech, according to the strong and weak speech mode hypotheses, they, respectively, engage perceptual mechanisms unique to speech or engage their knowledge of language as a whole.