News Finding: But the work of Poeppel and others suggests that a tonal time perception hinted at in apes and more fully formed in man could be a prerequisite for discerning a song.
Paper Finding: We suggest further that beta activity may reflect such low-level temporal regularity in the generation of temporal predictions for upcoming notes.
News Context: And our conscious ability to apply symbolic meaning to sounds, lyrics and song aEUR" and to recognize when listening to music that what weaEUR(tm)re listening to is supposed to be music aEUR" also certainly influences human musical perception. But the work of Poeppel and others suggests that a tonal time perception hinted at in apes and more fully formed in man could be a prerequisite for discerning a song. Musical appreciation might begin with our brains simply staying on beat.
Paper Context: We demonstrate that cortical oscillatory activity in both low (<8 Hz) and high frequencies is tightly coupled to behavioral performance in musical listening, in a bidirectional manner. We suggest further that beta activity may reflect such low-level temporal regularity in the generation of temporal predictions for upcoming notes. As such, the metric, notes per second (Materials and Methods), is meant to be associated with this more general process of event chunking-which must occur in all forms of sound stream processing-and should therefore not be confused with beat, meter, and the complex cognitive processes associated with these operations.