Large, E. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2022

Neural Entrainment to Musical Pulse In Naturalistic Music Is Preserved In Aging: Implications for Music-Based Interventions

Neural entrainment to musical rhythm is thought to underlie the perception and production of music. In aging populations, the strength of neural entrainment to rhythm has been found to be attenuated, particularly during attentive listening to auditory streams. However, previous studies on neural entrainment to rhythm and aging have often employed artificial auditory rhythms or limited pieces of recorded, naturalistic music, failing to account for the diversity of rhythmic structures found in natural music. As part of larger project assessing a novel music-based intervention for healthy aging, we investigated neural entrainment to musical rhythms in the electroencephalogram (EEG) while participants listened to self-selected musical recordings across a sample of younger and older adults. We specifically measured neural entrainment to the level of musical pulse--quantified here as the phase-locking value (PLV)--after normalizing the PLVs to each musical recordings detected pulse frequency. As predicted, we observed strong neural phase-locking to musical pulse, and to the sub-harmonic and harmonic levels of musical meter. Overall, PLVs were not significantly different between older and younger adults. This preserved neural entrainment to musical pulse and rhythm could support the design of music-based interventions that aim to modulate endogenous brain activity via self-selected music for healthy cognitive aging.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Collective dynamics support group drumming, reduce variability, and stabilize tempo drift

Humans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Human social interaction has largely been addressed in dyadic paradigms and it is yet to be determined whether the ensuing conclusions generalize to larger groups. Studied more extensively in nonhuman animal behaviour, the presence of multiple agents engaged in the same task space creates different constraints and possibilities than in simpler dyadic interactions. We addressed whether collective dynamics play a role in human circle drumming. The task was to synchronize in a group with an initial reference pattern and then maintain synchronization after it was muted. We varied the number of drummers, from solo to dyad, quartet, and octet. The observed lower variability, lack of speeding up, smoother individual dynamics, and leader-less inter-personal coordination indicated that stability increased as group size increased, a sort of temporal wisdom of crowds. We propose a hybrid continuous-discrete Kuramoto model for emergent group synchronization with pulse-based coupling that exhibits a mean field positive feedback loop. This research suggests that collective phenomena are among the factors that play a role in social cognition.

animal behavior and cognition↗