• wednesday, 12 december 2018—12:15

    The neuroscience of musical entrainment: insights from EEG frequency-tagging

    Sylvie Nozaradan,, Institute of Neuroscience - UCL

    Entrainment to music is a culturally widespread activity with increasingly recognized
    pro-social and therapeutic effects. Music powerfully compels us to move to the
    musical rhythm, showcasing the remarkable ability of humans to perceive and
    produce rhythmic inputs. There is a wave of current research exploring the neural
    bases of this rhythmic entrainment in both human and non-human animals, in
    evolutionary terms and in development. One way to investigate these neural
    dynamics is frequency-tagging, an approach recently developed to capture the
    neural processing of musical rhythm with surface or intracerebral
    electroencephalography (EEG).
    Recent experiments conducted in healthy and brain-damaged adults, in infants and
    in non-human animals while exposed to rhythm will be presented. Results show
    that, although the auditory system presents a remarkable ability to synchronize to
    the rhythmic input, the neural network responding to rhythm transforms the
    rhythmic input by amplifying specific frequencies. This selective shaping is correlated
    to the perception and individual ability to move in time with musical rhythms. These
    different results may lead to a new understanding of the neural bases of rhythmic
    entrainment.

    external seminar