Biology subjects

Zatorre, R.

Publications and source records attributed to Zatorre, R..

13 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Beyond the session: delayed effects of prefrontal theta-burst stimulation onthe liking of newly learned melodies

Reward operates as a cycle in which a stimulus produces a pleasure response, and the degree of pleasure experienced reinforces the behaviours that lead back to it. Music provides a useful model for examining this cycle because it is intrinsically pleasurable, can be learned, and engages reward-related frontostriatal circuitry that overlaps with circuitry involved in primary and secondary rewards, such as food, sex, and money. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a non-invasive stimulation method, has been shown to produce bidirectional effects on music-evoked pleasure by increasing or decreasing activity in cortical regions, such as the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), that are functionally connected to subcortical regions, including the striatum. Here, we further characterize the reward cycle by incorporating TMS into a paradigm that combines musical pleasure ratings with an early musical skill acquisition task. In a within-subjects, counterbalanced crossover design, 23 participants with 2-10 years of musical experience received intermittent TBS (iTBS; excitatory) and continuous TBS (cTBS; inhibitory) over the left DLPFC in separate sessions. Participants rated the pleasantness of short piano melodies before stimulation (T0), immediately afterwards (T1), and 24 hours later (T2). After stimulation, they learned to play the melodies, and pitch and rhythm accuracy were assessed during three performance phases, namely acquisition, immediately after acquisition, and 24 hours later. Liking did not differ between conditions at T1; however, the increase in liking from baseline (T0) to T2 was significantly larger following iTBS than cTBS, a divergence that emerged across the 24-hour interval spanning both learning and sleep. Pitch and rhythm accuracy did not differ between conditions at any phase, despite improvement across trials in both. These results indicate that TMS to the left DLPFC can produce delayed, condition-dependent shifts in musical liking without a parallel change in early skill acquisition.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Music-to-My-Brain: Modulation of Reward System Activity via Musical Neurofeedback

Music robustly engages the human reward system, yet whether this engagement can be harnessed for volitional self-neuromodulation remains unknown. We developed a musical neurofeedback approach that enables individuals to control a validated, fMRI-informed EEG marker of ventral striatal activity. Personalized pleasurable music served as feedback, becoming increasingly rewarding through acoustic manipulation as regulation improved, thereby creating a positive feedback loop. Across three double-blind, sham-controlled studies (N=80; two with repeated training), contingent neurofeedback enabled participants to upregulate this EEG signal reflecting ventral striatal activity; in studies with repeated training, this learning generalized to no-feedback contexts. In the neurofeedback (but not sham) group, regulation success correlated with self-reported hedonic capacity, indicating behavioral relevance. Pre-post fMRI further showed that improvements in ventral striatal BOLD self-regulation were associated with EEG-based regulation performance, supporting the EEG measure as a marker of ventral striatal modulation. Mechanistically, neurofeedback training enhanced functional connectivity between right auditory cortex and ventral striatum during listening to trained music, with stronger effects in the neurofeedback than in the sham group, demonstrating experience-dependent modification of auditory-reward pathways. Together, these findings reveal a mechanism for music-based reward self-regulation and offer a potential scalable, personalized approach for targeting reward dysfunction such as anhedonia.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Characterizing reward sensitivity to natural singing: an individual differences approach

Singing is an innate human behaviour present across cultures and the lifespan. Despite lacking direct biological advantages, its ubiquity suggests that it is intrinsically rewarding. This research aimed to investigate the underlying factors that explain variability in sensitivity to deriving reward and enjoyment from natural singing in the general population. In Study 1 (n = 606), an initial pool of items describing daily, non-professional singing behaviours were administered to an international adult sample. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a unidimensional structure of 20 items with acceptable model fit, organized into five facets representing distinct domains of singing-related rewards: 1) pleasure and emotional evocation, 2) social singing reward, 3) singing frequency, 4) mood regulation through singing, and 5) inattentional singing during routine tasks. In Study 2 (n = 430), confirmatory factor analysis in a new sample supported this structure. When both samples were combined (n = 1036), the unidimensional model defined by these five facets showed acceptable to excellent goodness-of-fit indices, supporting the conceptualization of singing reward as a multidimensional construct with differentiated facets. This led to the Barcelona-Aarhus Natural Singing Engagement Questionnaire (BANSEQ), which demonstrated excellent reliability ( = .94) and population-level stability. Study 3 (n = 1036) tested the convergent validity of BANSEQ with measures of music reward and engagement and identified sociodemographic and psychological correlates across the five facets of singing reward. Overall, these findings characterize the sources of individual differences in the hedonic experience of natural singing and propose BANSEQ as a robust psychometric tool for its assessment in the general population.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Neural coding of spectrotemporal modulations in the auditory cortex supports speech and music categorization

Auditory processing is typically described as hierarchical, culminating in neural representation of abstract categories. However, it remains unclear whether category-selective responses in auditory cortex require representational mechanisms beyond the coding of acoustic features, or whether the acoustic representations already available in the auditory cortex are sufficient to account for categorization. Here, we test whether cortical coding of spectrotemporal modulation (STM) features is sufficient to support speech-music categorization by combining human intracranial recordings with continuous behavioral judgments of a naturalistic soundtrack in which speech and music occur both separately and simultaneously. We show that temporal and spectral modulation patterns largely characterize speech and music, respectively, and that cortical auditory regions robustly track these features over time, with distinct oscillatory frequency bands preferentially encoding temporal and spectral modulations. Critically, cortical representations of STMs predicted perceptual categorical judgments gathered in an independent sample. Finally, speech- and music-related STM representations showed stronger tracking of category-specific acoustical features in left versus right cortical auditory regions, respectively. These findings indicate that the efficient neural coding of acoustical features provides a sufficient basis for the categorical distinction between speech and music, and that the temporal and spectral components of this representation are implemented through distinct oscillatory mechanisms.

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bioRxiv2024

Visual Congruency Modulates Music Reward through Sensorimotor Integration

There is emerging evidence that a performers body movements may enhance the music-induced pleasure of audiences. However, the neural mechanism underlying such modulation remains largely unexplored. This study utilized psychophysiological and electroencephalographic data collected from listeners as they watched and listened to manipulated vocal (Mandarin lyrics) and violin performances of Japanese and Chinese pop music. All participants were unfamiliar with the violin or Mandarin. The auditory and visual elements of the stimuli were either congruent (original recording) or incongruent (drawn from unrelated music videos). We found that congruent visual movements, as opposed to incongruent ones, increased both subjective pleasure ratings and skin conductance responses but only during vocal performances. Then, we examined the coherence between the music signal and sensorimotor Mu-band oscillatory neural activity and found that congruent visual movements enhanced Mu entrainment exclusively to vocal music signal. Further, mediation analysis demonstrated that neural entrainment to vocal music significantly mediated the visual modulation of music-induced pleasure. In conclusion, our study provides novel evidence on how congruent visual movements can heighten music-induced pleasure through enhanced sensorimotor integration.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Influence of social and semantic contexts in processing speech in noise

Social interactions occupy a significant part of life, and understanding others conversations is key to navigating our social world. While the role of semantics in speech comprehension is well-established at the word or sentence level, its influence on larger conversational scales, alongside social context, is less understood. The present study examined how semantic and social contexts modulate phonetic encoding during natural conversations using a speech-in-noise paradigm. Participants listened to AI-generated dialogues (two speakers) or monologues (one speaker) in an intact or sentence-scrambled order. Each trial contained five sentences, with the fifth sentence embedded in multi-talker babble noise. The same sentence was then repeated without noise, with one word either altered or unchanged. Healthy adults identified whether the sentence matched the in-noise version. Through several online experiments (N=211), both social and semantic contexts showed influences on speech-in-noise processing, with improved performance for dialogues over monologues and for intact over sentence-scrambled conversations. These results suggest that both semantic and social factors shape speech comprehension, emphasizing their role in auditory cognition. This finding raises important questions about predictive and other mechanisms involved in processing complex, multi-sentence conversations, underscoring the critical role of social interaction in communication.

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bioRxiv2023

Auditory hemispheric asymmetry as a specialization for actions and objects

What is the function of auditory hemispheric asymmetry? We propose that the identification of sound sources relies on two complementary and perceptually relevant acoustic invariants -- actions and objects -- that are processed asymmetrically and sufficient to model and categorize any sound. We observed that environmental sounds are an independent combination of purely temporal and spectral acoustic modulations. Behaviorally, discrimination of actions relied on temporal modulations, while discrimination of objects relied on spectral modulations. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data showed that actions and objects are respectively decoded in the left and right hemispheres, in bilateral superior temporal and left inferior frontal regions. This asymmetry reffects a generic differential processing -- through differential neural sensitivity to temporal and spectral modulations present in all environmental sounds -- that supports the efficient categorization of actions and objects. These results provide an ecologically valid framework of the functional role of auditory brain asymmetry.

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bioRxiv2023

Using rare genetic mutations to revisit structural brain asymmetry

Asymmetry between the left and right brain is a key feature of brain organization. Hemispheric functional specialization underlies some of the most advanced human-defining cognitive operations, such as articulated language, perspective taking, or rapid detection of facial cues. Yet, genetic investigations into brain asymmetry have mostly relied on common variant studies, which typically exert small effects on brain phenotypes. Here, we leverage rare genomic deletions and duplications to study how genetic alterations reverberate in human brain and behavior. We quantitatively dissected the impact of eight high-effect-size copy number variations (CNVs) on brain asymmetry in a multi-site cohort of 552 CNV carriers and 290 non-carriers. Isolated multivariate brain asymmetry patterns spotlighted regions typically thought to subserve lateralized functions, including language, hearing, as well as visual, face and word recognition. Planum temporale asymmetry emerged as especially susceptible to deletions and duplications of specific gene sets. Targeted analysis of common variants through genome-wide association study (GWAS) consolidated partly diverging genetic influences on the right versus left planum temporale structure. In conclusion, our gene-brain-behavior mapping highlights the consequences of genetically controlled brain lateralization on human-defining cognitive traits.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Development and validation of an fMRI-informed EEG model of reward-related ventral striatum activation

Reward processing is essential for our mental-health and well-being. Here, we present the development and validation of a scalable fMRI-informed EEG model related to reward processing in the ventral-striatum (VS); a central reward circuit node. Simultaneous EEG/fMRI data were acquired from 17 healthy individuals listening to pleasurable music, and used to construct a one-class regression model for predicting the reward-related VS-BOLD signal using spectro-temporal features from the EEG. Validation analyses, applied on EEG/fMRI data from a different group (N=14), revealed that the EEG model predicted VS-BOLD activation from the simultaneous EEG to a greater extent than a model derived from another anatomical region. The VS-EEG-model was also modulated by musical pleasure and predictive of the VS-BOLD during a monetary reward task, further indicating it functional relevance. These findings provide compelling evidence for the use of a scalable yet precise EEG-only probe of VS-originated reward processing, which could serve for process specific neruo-monitoring and -modulation.

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bioRxiv2020

Oscillatory entrainment of the Frequency Following Response in auditory cortical and subcortical structures

There is much debate about the existence and function of neural oscillatory entrainment mechanisms in the auditory system. The frequency-following response (FFR) is an index of neural periodicity encoding that can provide a vehicle to study entrainment in frequency ranges relevant to speech and music processing. Criteria for entrainment include the presence of post-stimulus oscillations and phase alignment between stimulus and endogenous activity. To test the hypothesis of entrainment, in experiment 1 we collected FFR data to a repeated syllable using magneto- (MEG) and electroencephalography in 20 healthy adults. We observed significant oscillatory activity after stimulus offset in auditory cortex and subcortical auditory nuclei, consistent with entrainment. In these structures the FFR fundamental frequency converged from a lower value over 100 ms to the stimulus frequency, consistent with phase alignment, and diverged to a lower value after offset, consistent with relaxation to a preferred frequency. In experiment 2, we tested how transitions between stimulus frequencies affected the MEG-FFR to a train of pure-tone pairs in 30 adults. We found that the FFR was affected by the frequency of the preceding tone for up to 40 ms at subcortical levels, and even longer durations at cortical levels. Our results suggest that oscillatory entrainment may be an integral part of periodic sound representation throughout the auditory neuraxis. The functional role of this mechanism is unknown, but it could serve as a fine-scale temporal predictor for frequency information, enhancing stability and reducing susceptibility to degradation that could be useful in real-life noisy environments.

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bioRxiv2020

Dopaminergic signalling modulates reward-driven music memory consolidation

Previously, we provided causal evidence for a dopamine-dependent effect of intrinsic reward on memory during self-regulated learning (Ripolles et al., 2016; Ripolles et al., 2018). Here, we further investigated the dopamine-dependent link between reward and memory by focusing on one of the most iconic abstract rewards in humans: music. Twenty-nine healthy participants listened to unfamiliar excerpts--which had to be remembered following a consolidation period--after the intake of a dopaminergic antagonist, a dopaminergic precursor, and a placebo across three separated sessions. The intervention modulated the pleasantness experienced during music-listening and memory recognition of the presented songs (i.e., lower with the antagonist, higher with the precursor) in individuals with higher sensitivity to musical reward. Our work highlights the flexibility of the human dopaminergic system, which is able to enhance memory formation not only through explicit and/or primary reinforcers but also via intrinsic, abstract, or aesthetic rewards of different natures.

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bioRxiv2019

Enhanced insular connectivity with speech sensorimotor regions in trained singers: a resting-state fMRI study

The insula contributes to the detection of salient events during goal-directed behavior and participates in the coordination of motor, multisensory, and cognitive systems. Recent task-fMRI studies with trained singers suggest that singing experience can enhance the access to these resources. However, the long-term effects of vocal training on insula based networks are still unknown. In this study, we employed resting-state fMRI to assess experience-dependent differences in insula co-activation patterns between conservatory-trained singers and non-singers. Results indicate enhanced bilateral insula connectivity in singers relative to non-singers with constituents of the speech sensorimotor network in both hemispheres. Specifically, with the cerebellum (lobule VI, crus 2), primary somatosensory cortex, the parietal lobes, and the thalamus. Furthermore, singing training predicted enhanced bilateral co-activation of primary sensorimotor areas representing the larynx (with left dorsal anterior insula, dAI) and the diaphragm (with bilateral dAI)--crucial regions for cortico-motor control of complex vocalizations, as well as the thalamus (with bilateral posterior insula/left dAI) and the left putamen (with left dAI). Together, these data support a crucial role of the insula in respiratory and laryngeal control and suggest that singing experience enhances the integration of somatosensory information within the speech motor system, perhaps by strengthening salient associations of bodily signals associated with conscious and non-conscious aspects of expressive language production within a musical framework.

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bioRxiv2018

Partially Overlapping Brain Networks for Singing and Cello Playing

1This research uses an MR-Compatible cello to compare functional brain activation during singing and cello playing within the same individuals to determine the extent to which arbitrary auditory-motor associations, like those required to play the cello, co-opt functional brain networks that evolved for singing. Musical instrument playing and singing both require highly specific associations between sounds and movements. However, vocal motor control is an evolutionarily old human trait and the auditory-motor associations used for singing are also used for speech and nonspeech vocalizations. This sets it apart from the arbitrary auditory-motor associations required to play musical instruments. The pitch range of the cello is similar to that of the human voice, but cello playing is completely independent of the vocal apparatus and can therefore be used to dissociate the auditory-vocal network from that of the auditory-motor network. While in the MR-Scanner, 11 expert cellists listened to and subsequently produced individual tones either by singing or cello playing. All participants were able to sing and play the target tones in tune (within 50Cents). We found that brain activity during cello playing directly overlaps with brain activity during singing in many areas within the auditory-vocal network. These include primary motor, dorsal pre-motor, and supplementary motor cortices, the primary and periprimary auditory cortices within the superior temporal gyrus including Heschls gyrus, anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and intraparietal sulcus, and cerebellum but, notably, exclude the periaqueductal grey and basal ganglia. Second, we found that activity within the overlapping areas is positively correlated with, and therefore likely contributing to, both singing and playing in tune determined with performance measures. Third, we found that activity in auditory areas is functionally connected with activity in dorsal motor and pre-motor areas, and that the connectivity between them is positively correlated with good performance on this task. This functional connectivity suggests that the brain areas are working together to contribute to task performance and not just coincidently active. Last, our findings showed that cello playing may directly co-opt vocal areas (including larynx area of motor cortex), especially if musical training begins before age 7.

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