Tagging the Neuronal Entrainment to Beat and Meter

TLDR

The experience of music relies on perceiving beat and meter, yet the neural representation of these periodicities remains largely unknown. The study tests whether neuronal entrainment to beat and meter underlies this perceptual function. EEG was recorded while participants listened to a musical beat and imagined binary or ternary meter. EEG revealed a sustained periodic response at the beat frequency and an additional frequency when participants imagined meter, providing direct evidence of neural entrainment to beat and meter and positioning music as a unique context for studying dynamic cognitive entrainment.

Abstract

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.