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“Whenever we feel the beat in a rhythm, motor areas are involved-even if we are not moving at all”, explained Jessica Grahn, a cognitive neuroscientist at Western University in London, Ontario. They found that beat perception activates several brain areas, including basal ganglia and parts of the secondary motor areas of the cortex 1. The beat is somehow contained in the stimulus, but it may not always be obvious beat perception is also a psychological construct.ĭuring the past decade, a number of studies compared brain activation patterns while participants listen to a stimulus that does or does not induce beat perception. Depending on the signal's regularity and structure, we can extract a meter and sense it as a three-four time or four-four time.
MUSICALITY WHO YOU ARE SERIES
When we hear a rhythm, or just a series of beeps or clicks, we may or may not feel that it has a beat. But what exactly is it that music does to our brain? How exactly does it play with our sense of time? Music perception is predictive timing It taps into our brain's ability to sense the structure of temporal sequences and draw reward from making predictions: It may just be a means to shower ourselves in dopamine. Music makes use of both predictive coding and predictive timing. A school of fish or a flock of birds all turning at the same time, a dog jumping to catch a ball-predictive timing kicks in whenever animals coordinate their movements with their environment. In addition to predicting what will happen next, it is just as important to know exactly when it will happen, and an analogous system of “predictive timing” takes on this task. This prediction is tightly coupled to the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter of reward. It predicts incoming sensory information based on experience and context. “Predictive coding” is a conceptual framework of how the brain makes forecasts. “Music plays with predictions, and this is what makes it so interesting to science”, explained Vuust, because it helps to investigate the brain's predictive timing mechanisms. Mostly, these anticipations will be met, but sometimes not. Music is never perceived instantly: We need a few notes or beats before we detect a rhythm, and with the last few notes in mind, we anticipate what will happen next. Perceiving music has much to do with our sense of time and anticipation. “Music is art in time”, said Peter Vuust, a neuroscientist and music theoretician at Aarhus University in Denmark. The musical abilities of humankind have puzzled scientists for centuries, and Charles Darwin ranked them as “one of the most mysterious with which he is endowed”. Why do we make music, why do we like it, and how do we even perceive it? Music moves us in every sense of the word. Every culture has its songs and dances, everywhere in the world people listen to music even small children clap their hands and move to the rhythm of the beat. Music is universally cherished across humanity.