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.