News Finding: 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.
Paper Finding: This methodological choice allows us to study the rate of the music without delving into the complexities of beat and meter, which can shift nonmonotonically with increasing overall rate (i.e., faster notes are often arranged into larger groupings).
News Context: "Musicians, through their experience, are simply better at this type of processing." 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.
Paper Context: Building on effects such as these, we expect that increased entrainment and reliability in musicians' cortical responses may reflect expertise. This methodological choice allows us to study the rate of the music without delving into the complexities of beat and meter, which can shift nonmonotonically with increasing overall rate (i.e., faster notes are often arranged into larger groupings). 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.