Intracerebral recordings reveal emphasized representation of musical meter across auditory and sensory-motor associative areas of the human brain
(2023) Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop — Location: Nottingham, UK (19.June.2023)
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- Abstract
- When listening to music, humans readily perceive and move along with a periodic meter. This ability has been proposed to rely on an emphasized representation of metric periodicities in the human brain activity. However, whether this behavior-relevant representation is achieved in auditory brain areas or whether it is involves motor associative areas remains debated. Here, we addressed this question by recording local field potentials from 1841 intracranial contacts in 13 patients implanted with depth electrodes, providing high temporal and spatial resolution to record brain activity. Participants were listening to auditory rhythms known to induce perception of a consistent meter across Western healthy adults. We found neural responses to the rhythms in a number of areas including superior temporal, parietal and frontal cortices. Meter representation was measured from each area using frequency-tagging and autocorrelation. Many responsive areas showed an enhanced meter representation even when meter periodicities were not acoustically prominent in the stimulus. This selective enhancement of meter was found in the primary auditory cortex but also in higher-level sensory-motor associative areas such as the supramarginal gyrus in the parietal cortex. As revealed by biomimetic models, the enhanced meter representation in these cortical regions could not be fully explained by early subcortical auditory nonlinearities. Together, these findings indicate a general mechanism that transforms sensory inputs to a format that supports meter perception. This mechanism affects sound representation already in the primary auditory cortex, and likely emerges from an interconnected network of sensory and higher-level associative brain regions.
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Lenc, T., Jonas, J., Rossion, B., Colnat-Coulbois, S., & Nozaradan, S. (2023). Intracerebral recordings reveal emphasized representation of musical meter across auditory and sensory-motor associative areas of the human brain. Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop, Nottingham, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/28610