News Finding: Only musicians, however, showed oscillations that synchronized with unusually slow clips.
Paper Finding: 10 and 42).
News Context: For music that is faster than one note per second, both musicians and non-musicians showed cortical oscillations that synchronized with the note rate of the clips--in other words, these oscillations were effectively employed by everyone to process the sounds they heard, although musicians' brains synchronized more to the musical rhythms. Only musicians, however, showed oscillations that synchronized with unusually slow clips. This difference, the researchers say, may suggest that non-musicians are unable to process the music as a continuous melody rather than as individual notes.
Paper Context: The fact that the beta effect is more centrally located than the auditory channels supports the hypothesis that the source of the beta oscillation is a part of a sensorimotor synchronization network (e.g., refs. 10 and 42). (It should be noted that we are unable to confirm this without source localization, which we are unable to perform due to a lack of anatomical MRI scans for the participants of this study.)