In The Descent of Man, Darwin speculated that our capacity for musical rhythm reflects basic aspects of brain function broadly shared among animals. Although this remains an appealing idea, it is ...being challenged by modern cross-species research. This research hints that our capacity to synchronize to a beat, i.e., to move in time with a perceived pulse in a manner that is predictive and flexible across a broad range of tempi, may be shared by only a few other species. Is this really the case? If so, it would have important implications for our understanding of the evolution of human musicality.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel challenges the widespread belief that music and ...language are processed independently. This volume argues that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities.
Mounting evidence suggests that musical training benefits the neural encoding of speech. This paper offers a hypothesis specifying why such benefits occur. The "OPERA" hypothesis proposes that such ...benefits are driven by adaptive plasticity in speech-processing networks, and that this plasticity occurs when five conditions are met. These are: (1) Overlap: there is anatomical overlap in the brain networks that process an acoustic feature used in both music and speech (e.g., waveform periodicity, amplitude envelope), (2) Precision: music places higher demands on these shared networks than does speech, in terms of the precision of processing, (3) Emotion: the musical activities that engage this network elicit strong positive emotion, (4) Repetition: the musical activities that engage this network are frequently repeated, and (5) Attention: the musical activities that engage this network are associated with focused attention. According to the OPERA hypothesis, when these conditions are met neural plasticity drives the networks in question to function with higher precision than needed for ordinary speech communication. Yet since speech shares these networks with music, speech processing benefits. The OPERA hypothesis is used to account for the observed superior subcortical encoding of speech in musically trained individuals, and to suggest mechanisms by which musical training might improve linguistic reading abilities.
The human capacity to synchronize movements to an auditory beat is central to musical behaviour and to debates over the evolution of human musicality. Have humans evolved any neural specializations ...for music processing, or does music rely entirely on brain circuits that evolved for other reasons? The vocal learning and rhythmic synchronization hypothesis proposes that our ability to move in time with an auditory beat in a precise, predictive and tempo-flexible manner originated in the neural circuitry for complex vocal learning. In the 15 years since the hypothesis was proposed a variety of studies have supported it. However, one study has provided a significant challenge to the hypothesis. Furthermore, it is increasingly clear that vocal learning is not a binary trait animals have or lack, but varies more continuously across species. In the light of these developments and of recent progress in the neurobiology of beat processing and of vocal learning, the current paper revises the vocal learning hypothesis. It argues that an advanced form of vocal learning acts as a preadaptation for sporadic beat perception and synchronization (BPS), providing intrinsic rewards for predicting the temporal structure of complex acoustic sequences. It further proposes that in humans, mechanisms of gene-culture coevolution transformed this preadaptation into a genuine neural adaptation for sustained BPS. The larger significance of this proposal is that it outlines a hypothesis of cognitive gene-culture coevolution which makes testable predictions for neuroscience, cross-species studies and genetics.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology’.
How Beat Perception Co-opts Motor Neurophysiology Cannon, Jonathan J.; Patel, Aniruddh D.
Trends in cognitive sciences,
February 2021, 2021-02-00, 20210201, Letnik:
25, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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Beat perception offers cognitive scientists an exciting opportunity to explore how cognition and action are intertwined in the brain even in the absence of movement. Many believe the motor system ...predicts the timing of beats, yet current models of beat perception do not specify how this is neurally implemented. Drawing on recent insights into the neurocomputational properties of the motor system, we propose that beat anticipation relies on action-like processes consisting of precisely patterned neural time-keeping activity in the supplementary motor area (SMA), orchestrated and sequenced by activity in the dorsal striatum. In addition to synthesizing recent advances in cognitive science and motor neuroscience, our framework provides testable predictions to guide future work.
Components of the brain’s motor system are activated by the perception of a musical beat, even in the absence of movement, and may play an important role in beat-based temporal prediction.Two key brain regions involved in movement, the supplementary motor area (SMA) and dorsal striatum, have neurocomputational properties that lend themselves to beat perception.In SMA, neural firing rates represent the phase of cyclic sensorimotor processes.The involvement of SMA in perceptual suppression of self-generated sounds suggests that it could play a broader role in informing auditory expectations.The dorsal striatum plays a central role in initiating and sequencing units of movement, and may serve similar functions in structuring beat-based temporal anticipation.
Temporal modulations in speech and music Ding, Nai; Patel, Aniruddh D.; Chen, Lin ...
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews,
October 2017, 2017-Oct, 2017-10-00, 20171001, Letnik:
81, Številka:
Pt B
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•Speech modulation spectrum is consistent across languages.•Music modulation spectrum is consistent across musical instruments/genres.•Temporal modulations in speech and music show distinct time ...scales.
Speech and music have structured rhythms. Here we discuss a major acoustic correlate of spoken and musical rhythms, the slow (0.25–32Hz) temporal modulations in sound intensity and compare the modulation properties of speech and music. We analyze these modulations using over 25h of speech and over 39h of recordings of Western music. We show that the speech modulation spectrum is highly consistent across 9 languages (including languages with typologically different rhythmic characteristics). A different, but similarly consistent modulation spectrum is observed for music, including classical music played by single instruments of different types, symphonic, jazz, and rock. The temporal modulations of speech and music show broad but well-separated peaks around 5 and 2Hz, respectively. These acoustically dominant time scales may be intrinsic features of speech and music, a possibility which should be investigated using more culturally diverse samples in each domain. Distinct modulation timescales for speech and music could facilitate their perceptual analysis and its neural processing.
Instrumental music and language are both syntactic systems, employing complex, hierarchically-structured sequences built using implicit structural norms. This organization allows listeners to ...understand the role of individual words or tones in the context of an unfolding sentence or melody. Previous studies suggest that the brain mechanisms of syntactic processing may be partly shared between music and language. However, functional neuroimaging evidence for anatomical overlap of brain activity involved in linguistic and musical syntactic processing has been lacking. In the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with an interference paradigm based on sung sentences. We show that the processing demands of musical syntax (harmony) and language syntax interact in Broca's area in the left inferior frontal gyrus (without leading to music and language main effects). A language main effect in Broca's area only emerged in the complex music harmony condition, suggesting that (with our stimuli and tasks) a language effect only becomes visible under conditions of increased demands on shared neural resources. In contrast to previous studies, our design allows us to rule out that the observed neural interaction is due to: (1) general attention mechanisms, as a psychoacoustic auditory anomaly behaved unlike the harmonic manipulation, (2) error processing, as the language and the music stimuli contained no structural errors. The current results thus suggest that two different cognitive domains-music and language-might draw on the same high level syntactic integration resources in Broca's area.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
a perceived periodic pulse that structures the perception of musical rhythm and which serves as a framework for synchronized movement to music. What are the neural mechanisms of musical beat ...perception, and how did they evolve? One view, which dates back to Darwin and implicitly informs some current models of beat perception, is that the relevant neural mechanisms are relatively general and are widespread among animal species. On the basis of recent neural and cross-species data on musical beat processing, this paper argues for a different view. Here we argue that beat perception is a complex brain function involving temporally-precise communication between auditory regions and motor planning regions of the cortex (even in the absence of overt movement). More specifically, we propose that simulation of periodic movement in motor planning regions provides a neural signal that helps the auditory system predict the timing of upcoming beats. This "action simulation for auditory prediction" (ASAP) hypothesis leads to testable predictions. We further suggest that ASAP relies on dorsal auditory pathway connections between auditory regions and motor planning regions via the parietal cortex, and suggest that these connections may be stronger in humans than in non-human primates due to the evolution of vocal learning in our lineage. This suggestion motivates cross-species research to determine which species are capable of human-like beat perception, i.e., beat perception that involves accurate temporal prediction of beat times across a fairly broad range of tempi.
Pleasure in music has been linked to predictive coding of melodic and rhythmic patterns, subserved by connectivity between regions in the brain's auditory and reward networks. Specific musical ...anhedonics derive little pleasure from music and have altered auditory-reward connectivity, but no difficulties with music perception abilities and no generalized physical anhedonia. Recent research suggests that specific musical anhedonics experience pleasure in nonmusical sounds, suggesting that the implicated brain pathways may be specific to music reward. However, this work used sounds with clear real-world sources (e.g., babies laughing, crowds cheering), so positive hedonic responses could be based on the referents of these sounds rather than the sounds themselves. We presented specific musical anhedonics and matched controls with isolated short pleasing and displeasing synthesized sounds of varying timbres with no clear real-world referents. While the two groups found displeasing sounds equally displeasing, the musical anhedonics gave substantially lower pleasure ratings to the pleasing sounds, indicating that their sonic anhedonia is not limited to musical rhythms and melodies. Furthermore, across a large sample of participants, mean pleasure ratings for pleasing synthesized sounds predicted significant and similar variance in six dimensions of musical reward considered to be relatively independent, suggesting that pleasure in sonic timbres play a role in eliciting reward-related responses to music. We replicate the earlier findings of preserved pleasure ratings for semantically referential sounds in musical anhedonics and find that pleasure ratings of semantic referents, when presented without sounds, correlated with ratings for the sounds themselves. This association was stronger in musical anhedonics than in controls, suggesting the use of semantic knowledge as a compensatory mechanism for affective sound processing. Our results indicate that specific musical anhedonia is not entirely specific to melodic and rhythmic processing, and suggest that timbre merits further research as a source of pleasure in music.
Recent research suggests that musical training enhances the neural encoding of speech. Why would musical training have this effect? The OPERA hypothesis proposes an answer on the basis of the idea ...that musical training demands greater precision in certain aspects of auditory processing than does ordinary speech perception. This paper presents two assumptions underlying this idea, as well as two clarifications, and suggests directions for future research.
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