External speakers: Sylvie Nozaradan. How humans categorize rhythm: a brain that transforms sounds into musical beat and more

What: How humans categorize rhythm: a brain that transforms sounds into musical beat and more

Where: BCBL Auditorium and Auditorium zoom room (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Sylvie Nozaradan. MD, PhD, Professor, Institute of Neuroscience, UCLouvain, Belgium

When:  Thursday,  Nov 20th at 12:00 PM noon.

Experiencing music often entails perceiving and moving along with a regular beat. What do we know about the nature and neural underpinnings of this universal human practice? The talk will present recent research investigating the neural basis of this phenomenon by capitalizing on scalp and intracerebral electrophysiological recordings of brain activity conducted across the lifespan, species, cultures and brain areas. Results provide converging evidence that the perception of musical rhythm, and in particular the perception of periodic beats, involves processes that transform the rhythmic stimulus into a temporally recurrent format with emphasized beat periodicity. This transformation is observed at the earliest cortical stage of sound processing, namely in the primary auditory cortex, and is present in human adults and infants as well as non-human primates, although it cannot be explained by acoustic properties of the input or subcortical auditory processing. This higher-level "periodized" representation of rhythm may thus constitute a basis for further neural processes driving rhythmic coordinated behaviors in music. Current research is now investigating the plasticity of these brain processes allowing prior experience of culture and movement to imprint onto rhythm processing in humans. Finally, the talk will introduce a novel approach combining electrophysiology, frequency analysis and representational similarity analysis to capture brain categorization of rhythm beyond periodic beats. This novel approach offers promising perspectives to elucidate the brain bases of the universality and diversity of musical rhythm in humans.