Neural Entrainment to Musical Pulse in Naturalistic Music Is Preserved in Aging: Implications for Music-Based Interventions

Abstract

Neural entrainment to musical rhythm is thought to underlie the perception and production of music. In aging populations, the strength of neural entrainment to rhythm has been found to be attenuated, particularly during attentive listening to auditory streams. However, previous studies on neural entrainment to rhythm and aging have often employed artificial auditory rhythms or limited pieces of recorded, naturalistic music, failing to account for the diversity of rhythmic structures found in natural music. As part of larger project assessing a novel music-based intervention for healthy aging, we investigated neural entrainment to musical rhythms in the electroencephalogram (EEG) while participants listened to self-selected musical recordings across a sample of younger and older adults. We specifically measured neural entrainment to the level of musical pulse—quantified here as the phase-locking value (PLV)—after normalizing the PLVs to each musical recording’s detected pulse frequency. As predicted, we observed strong neural phase-locking to musical pulse, and to the sub-harmonic and harmonic levels of musical meter. Overall, PLVs were not significantly different between older and younger adults. This preserved neural entrainment to musical pulse and rhythm could support the design of music-based interventions that aim to modulate endogenous brain activity via self-selected music for healthy cognitive aging.

Functional Organization of Auditory and Reward Systems in Aging

“…Since SMA is often activated in auditory imagery (Lima et al; 2016), especially during beat perception in rhythmic music (Nombela et al, 2013), this result may reflect that the experience of rhythm during music listening is more salient for young adults. Consistent with this view, neurophysiological responses comparing young and older adults during music listening have shown that both groups are broadly sensitive to the beat in neural phase locking measures, but subtle differences persist in topographical distributions of phase locking at different levels of the beat (Tichko et al, 2022).…”

Individualized music induces theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling in patients with disorders of consciousness

“…Given that previous researches have observed stronger neural synchronization in musical pulse frequency and its harmonics frequencies ( Tierney and Kraus, 2015 ; Tichko et al, 2022 ), and considering the differences in preferred music in our study, we focused on analyzing the neural entrainment to both the pulse frequency and its corresponding harmonic frequency of individualized music. Initially, we identified the pulse frequency of individualized music by extracting the peak frequency from the power spectrum of the music envelope.…”

Toward Personalized Music-Therapy: A Neurocomputational Modeling Perspective

“…This factor can play an important role in neuro-degenerative processes that affect episodic memory such as in dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Tichko et al, [34] observed strong neural entrainment in older adults listening to self-selected music, suggesting that familiarity and the associated pleasure in music listening can aid in preserving neural connections employed in rhythmic perception that may have deteriorated as a result of ageing. Additionally, there is strong evidence that vocal music listening enhanced verbal memory recovery in stroke patients that suffer from aphasia [35], in addition to improvement in anxiety and depression [25].…”