RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Tagging the Neuronal Entrainment to Beat and Meter
JF The Journal of Neuroscience
JO J. Neurosci.
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP 10234
OP 10240
DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0411-11.2011
VO 31
IS 28
A1 Sylvie Nozaradan
A1 Isabelle Peretz
A1 Marcus Missal
A1 André Mouraux
YR 2011
UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/28/10234.abstract
AB Feeling the beat and meter is fundamental to the experience of music. However, how these periodicities are represented in the brain remains largely unknown. Here, we test whether this function emerges from the entrainment of neurons resonating to the beat and meter. We recorded the electroencephalogram while participants listened to a musical beat and imagined a binary or a ternary meter on this beat (i.e., a march or a waltz). We found that the beat elicits a sustained periodic EEG response tuned to the beat frequency. Most importantly, we found that meter imagery elicits an additional frequency tuned to the corresponding metric interpretation of this beat. These results provide compelling evidence that neural entrainment to beat and meter can be captured directly in the electroencephalogram. More generally, our results suggest that music constitutes a unique context to explore entrainment phenomena in dynamic cognitive processing at the level of neural networks.