News Finding: The findings also suggest musical training can enhance the functional role of brain rhythms.
Paper Finding: Recordings from nonmusicians demonstrate cortical entrainment that tracks musical stimuli over a typical range of tempi, but not at tempi below 1 note per second.
News Context: The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, points to a newfound role the brain's cortical oscillations play in the detection of musical sequences. The findings also suggest musical training can enhance the functional role of brain rhythms. "Specifically, our findings show that the presence of these rhythms enhances our perception of music and of pitch changes."
Paper Context: We demonstrate that cortical oscillatory activity in both low (<8 Hz) and high (15-30 Hz) frequencies is tightly coupled to behavioral performance in musical listening, in a bidirectional manner. Recordings from nonmusicians demonstrate cortical entrainment that tracks musical stimuli over a typical range of tempi, but not at tempi below 1 note per second. Importantly, the observed entrainment correlates with performance on a concurrent pitch-related behavioral task.