Exploring how musical rhythm entrains brain activity with electroencephalogram frequency-tagging

Abstract

The ability to perceive a regular beat in music and synchronize to this beat is a widespread human skill. Fundamental to musical behaviour, beat and meter refer to the perception of periodicities while listening to musical rhythms and often involve spontaneous entrainment to move on these periodicities. Here, we present a novel experimental approach inspired by the frequency-tagging approach to understand the perception and production of rhythmic inputs. This approach is illustrated here by recording the human electroencephalogram responses at beat and meter frequencies elicited in various contexts: mental imagery of meter, spontaneous induction of a beat from rhythmic patterns, multisensory integration and sensorimotor synchronization. Collectively, our observations support the view that entrainment and resonance phenomena subtend the processing of musical rhythms in the human brain. More generally, they highlight the potential of this approach to help us understand the link between the phenomenology of musical beat and meter and the bias towards periodicities arising under certain circumstances in the nervous system. Entrainment to music provides a highly valuable framework to explore general entrainment mechanisms as embodied in the human brain.

Cortical entrainment to music and its modulation by expertise

“…As the entrainment mechanism occurs for a wide range of acoustic stimuli, we find it unlikely to be following beat or meter in music: such clear groupings do not exist in other stimulus types. It should, however, be noted that influential recent research has addressed cortical beat or meter entrainment (11,12,(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37). In particular, using EEG, selective increases in power at beat and meter frequencies have been observed, even when those frequencies are not dominant in the acoustic spectrum (35,36).…”

Classification of familiarity based on cross-correlation features between EEG and music

“…Another approach is to measure an auditory steady-state response (ASSR), which can be elicited by periodically repeated sounds [10]. Recent studies have demonstrated that the cortical entrainment to periodic tones [11] and rhythms of music [12]. However, these MMN and ASSR approaches are not suitable to continuous stimuli such as natural music.…”

Communicative rhythms in brain and behaviour

“…Nozaradan's paper [10] explores how rhythm processing might capitalize on the intrinsic oscillatory dynamics of brain activity. She reviews a range of experiments using the electrophysiological approach of 'frequency-tagging'.…”

“…[5][6][7]), in particular with respect to the way in which enhanced rhythmicity can scaffold prediction in communicative exchanges (cf. [9,10]). …”

“…Thus, pulse perception can be induced from signals with little energy at the pulse frequency; metre perception is commonly supported by physical accentuation of particular beat positions, e.g. in terms of their duration, pitch or intensity, but can on occasion be merely imagined or subjectively imposed [10]. As the difficulty of inferring/inducing the beat and/or metre from an acoustic rhythm varies, so does the perceived complexity of the rhythm.…”