The first is to learn more about the processing of music in general. That is, which areas of the brain are involved and if there are specific markers of brain activity due to the processing of music and musical syntax. The second aspect is to compare the processing of musical and linguistic syntax to find out, if they have an effect upon each other or if there even is a significant overlap. The verification of an overlap would support the thesis, that syntactic operations (musical as well as linguistic) are modular. "Modular" means, that the complex system of processing is decomposed into subsystems with modular functions. Concerning the processing of syntax this would mean, that the domain of music and language each have specific syntactic representations, but that they share neural resources for activating and integrating these representations during syntactic processing. Processing of music and musical syntax comprises several aspects concerning melodic, rhythmic, metric, timbral and harmonic structure. For the processing of chord functions four steps in processing can be described. (1)Primarily, a tonal centre has to be detected out of the first chords of a sequence. Often the first chord is interpreted as the tonal centre of a sequence and a reevaluation is necessary, if the first chord has another harmonic function. (2)Successive chords are related to this tonal centre concerning their harmonic distance from the tonal centre. (3)As described above (Does music have a syntax?), music has a hierarchical structure in terms of pitch organization and organization of tensioning and releasing in music. Pitch organization concerning chords means, that in a musical phrase the tonic is the most stable chord and experienced as the resting point. The dominant and subdominant anon are more stable than the submediant and the supertonic. The progression of chords in time forms a tonal structure based on pitch organization, in which moving away from the tonic is perceived as tensioning and moving towards the tonic is experienced as releasing. Therefore, hierarchical relations may convey organized patterns of meaning. (4)Concerning harmonic aspects of major-minor tonal music, Musical syntax can be characterized by statistical regularities in the succession of chord functions in time, that is probabilities of chord transitions. As these regularities are stored in a long-term memory, predictions about following chords are made automatically, when listening to a musical phrase. The violation of these automatically made predictions lead to the observation of so-called ERPs (event related potential, a stereotyped electrophysiological response to an internal or external stimulus).