Suppression, Maintenance, and Surprise: Neuronal Correlates of Predictive Processing Specialization for Musical Rhythm

Auditory repetition suppression and omission activation are opposite neural phenomena and manifestations of principles of predictive processing. Repetition suppression describes the temporal decrease in neural activity when a stimulus is constant or repeated in an expected temporal fashion; omission activity is the transient increase in neural activity when a stimulus is temporarily and unexpectedly absent. The temporal, repetitive nature of musical rhythms is ideal for investigating these phenomena. During an fMRI session, 10 healthy participants underwent scanning while listening to musical rhythms with two levels of metric complexity, and with beat omissions with different positional complexity. Participants first listened to 16-s-long presentations of continuous rhythms, before listening to a longer continuous presentation with beat omissions quasi-randomly introduced. We found deactivation in bilateral superior temporal gyri during the repeated presentation of the normal, unaltered rhythmic stimulus, with more suppression of activity in the left hemisphere. Omission activation of bilateral middle temporal gyri was right lateralized. Persistent activity was found in areas including the supplementary motor area, caudate nucleus, anterior insula, frontal areas, and middle and posterior cingulate cortex, not overlapping with either listening, suppression, or omission activation. This suggests that the areas are perhaps specialized for working memory maintenance. We found no effect of metric complexity for either the normal presentation or omissions, but we found evidence for a small effect of omission position—at an uncorrected threshold—where omissions in the more metrical salient position, i.e., the first position in the bar, showed higher activation in anterior cingulate/medial superior frontal gyrus, compared to omissions in the less salient position, in line with the role of the anterior cingulate cortex for saliency detection. The results are consistent with findings in our previous studies on Parkinson’s disease, but are put into a bigger theoretical frameset

Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower, higher, and use more stable pitches than speech: a registered report

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a “musi-linguistic” continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech

Music and heart rate. Physiological effects from listening to music in different tempos

Music has the power to elicit physiological responses in humans. One assumes that fast music tempo elicit faster heart rate and respiration rate and slower music tempos elicit slower respiration and heart rate. This presumption that music could alter physiological responses was tested in this study by playing different tempos to the participants while measuring respiration and heart rate. Six different music tempos from 40 beats per minute to 200 beats per minute were presented as musical stimuli. Thirteen piano music pieces were composed at the Institute of Biology and Medical Psychology (IBMP) at the University of Bergen (UiB). The stimuli were recorded and presented in a pseudo-randomised order. White noise served as a control stimuli and was played between each stimulus. 36 participants listened to these novel music stimuli, while heart rate and respiration rate was measured. The current study found a quadratic relationship between heart rate and music tempo, and a linear relationship between respiration and music tempo. Music tempo increased heart rate up to 136 beats per minutes, after that heart rate dropped. While respiration linearly increased up to 200 beats per minute. The hypothesis was confirmed, as this study concluded with an alteration of physiological responses while listening to different music tempos

Does singing enhance cooperation more than speaking does? A global experimental Stage 1 Registered Report

The evolution of music, language, and cooperation have been debated since before Darwin. The social bonding hypothesis proposes that these phenomena may be interlinked: musicality may have facilitated the evolution of group cooperation beyond the possibilities of spoken language. Although dozens of experimental studies have shown that synchronised rhythms can promote cooperation, it is unclear whether synchronous singing enhances cooperation relative to spoken language, particularly across diverse societies that differ in their musical/linguistic rhythms and social organisation. Here, we propose a Registered Report to test this hypothesis through a global experiment in diverse languages aiming to collect data from 1500 participants across 50 sites. The social bonding hypothesis predicts that cooperation will increase more after synchronous singing than after spoken (sequential) conversation or (simultaneous) recitation, while alternative hypotheses predict that song will not increase cooperation relative to speech. Regardless of outcome, these results will provide an unprecedented understanding of cross-cultural relationships between music, language, and cooperation

Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower, higher, and use more stable pitches than speech: a registered report

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: 1) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and 2) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six pre-registered predictions, five were strongly supported: relative to speech, songs use 1) higher pitch, 2) slower temporal rate, and 3) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar 4) pitch interval size, and 5) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a “musi-linguistic” continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech