Hoezo geen ritmegevoel? [Dutch]

 

Een video short van de Universiteit van Nederland.

Heb jij ritmegevoel? [Dutch]

Videopodcast van de Universiteit van Nedererland: 

"Ritmegevoel, je denkt misschien dat je het niet hebt. Maar er is wereldwijd maar bij 6 mensen vastgesteld dat ze het verschil tussen ritmes écht niet kunnen horen. Je hebt dus wel degelijk ritmegevoel. Sterker nog... uit het onderzoek van Henkjan Honing (onderzoeker muziekcognitie aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam) blijkt dat dit niet alleen is aangeleerd, maar aangeboren. Zelfs baby's van een paar dagen oud hebben het door als je iets aan de regelmaat van muziek verandert. En ook sommige apen gaan spontaan bewegen op muziek. Hoe Henkjan hierachter kwam, en waarom we überhaupt ritmegevoel hebben, leer je in deze video."

Meer lezen? Hieronder enkele van de studies die genoemd worden in de video:

• Baby's : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105670
• Makaken :  https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00475  
• Chimpansees : https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910318116
• Hersenen :  https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2013.00274
• Boek : Aap slaat maat: Op zoek naar de oorsprong van muzikaliteit bij mens en dier
• Wetenschappelijke video summary : ICMPC,Tokyo, J
  

 

Why did we decide to revisit and overhaul our earlier beat perception studies?

Newborn baby participating in listening experiment
(courtesy Eszter Rozgonyiné Lányi).

[Published in Scientific American and MIT Press Reader]

In 2009, we found that newborns possess the ability to discern a regular pulse – the beat – in music. It’s a skill that might seem trivial to most of us but that’s fundamental to the creation and appreciation of music. The discovery sparked a profound curiosity in me, leading to an exploration of the biological underpinnings of our innate capacity for music, commonly referred to as “musicality.”

In a nutshell, the experiment involved playing drum rhythms, occasionally omitting a beat, and observing the newborns’ responses. Astonishingly, these tiny participants displayed an anticipation of the missing beat, as their brains exhibited a distinct spike, signaling a violation of their expectations when a note was omitted. This discovery not only unveiled the musical prowess of newborns but also helped lay the foundation for a burgeoning field dedicated to studying the origins of musicality.

Yet, as with any discovery, skepticism emerged (as it should). Some colleagues challenged our interpretation of the results, suggesting alternate explanations rooted in the acoustic nature of the stimuli we employed. Others argued that the observed reactions were a result of statistical learning, questioning the validity of beat perception being a separate mechanism essential to our musical capacity. Infants actively engage in statistical learning as they acquire a new language, enabling them to grasp elements such as word order and common accent structures in their native language. Why would music perception be any different?

To address these challenges, in 2015, our group decided to revisit and overhaul our earlier beat perception study, expanding its scope, method and scale, and, once more, decided to include, next to newborns, adults (musicians and non-musicians) and macaque monkeys.

 [...] Continue reading in The MIT Press Reader.

Waarom kunnen sommige mensen niet dansen? [Dutch]

Het Amsterdam Dance Event is begonnen. Waarom kunnen sommige mensen niet dansen? 

Een gesprek met neurowetenschapper Fleur Bouwer van de Universiteit van Amsterdam. De aflevering is hier te vinden. 

Waar komt ons gevoel voor muziek vandaan? [Dutch]

Hendrik Spiering in de wetenschapsbijlage van NRC Handelsblad van zaterdag 17 november 2018.

'Deze zomer verscheen [..] een kloek wetenschappelijk overzichtswerk The Origins of Musicality, een magnum opus. Honing: „We zijn nu echt verder dan 10, 15 jaar geleden, dankzij nieuwe inzichten uit de biologie. Er heerst een razende hypothesedrift!” In 2000 verscheen bij dezelfde wetenschappelijke uitgeverij (MIT Press) een vergelijkbaar groot handboek onder de titel The Origins of Music, Honing: „Onze nieuwe titel is natuurlijk expres gekozen. Toen ging het om het object: muziek. Nu gaat het over de capaciteit voor muziek. Die menselijke muzikaliteit bestaat op zijn minst uit twéé centrale vermogens, denken we: maatgevoel en relatief gehoor. Dat je dus haast gedachteloos met muziek kan meeklappen of meebewegen én dat je een melodie die iets hoger of lager wordt gezongen gewoon herkent als dezelfde melodie.” '

Een pdf van het artikel is hier te vinden.

Do rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) sense the beat?

Although monkeys seem to notice regularity in rhythmic sounds, they are not able to detect the actual beat. This is the finding of a new study by researchers from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The study, published on 16 July 2018 in the journal Frontiers of Neuroscience, lends further evidence to the hypothesis that beat perception is omnipresent in humans but only gradually developed in primates. 

The gradual audiomotor evolution (GAE) hypothesis. The GAE hypothesis suggests connections between medial premotor cortex (MPC), inferior parietal lobe (IPL), and primary auditory area (A1) to be stronger in humans as compared to other primates (marked with red lines), suggesting beat-based timing to have gradually evolved. Line thickness indicates the hypothesized connection strength.

Even a cursory glance at the animal kingdom shows that most animals exhibit some sort of rhythmic behavior, like walking, flying, crawling or swimming. Based on this behavior, it wouldn’t be outlandish to think that the perception and enjoyment of rhythm might be shared by most animals, and not only humans. While recent experimental research is finding some support for this view, studies also show that there are certain aspects of rhythm cognition that are indeed species-specific, such as the capacity to perceive a regular pulse (beat) in a varying rhythm and consequently being able to synchronize or dance to it.

A rhythmic sequence

Building on their earlier research, the researchers investigated whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are able to perceive beat through a s0-called auditory oddball paradigm, an experiment in which sequences of repetitive sounds are infrequently interrupted by a deviant sound. ‘Most existing animal studies on beat-based timing and rhythmic entrainment have used behavioural methods to probe the presence of beat perception, such as tapping tasks or measuring head bobs’, says Henkjan Honing, professor of Music Cognition at the UvA and lead author. ‘However, even if certain species do not show a physical ability to synchronise their movements to a regular beat, this doesn’t automatically mean they are incapable of perceiving it.’

For their study, the researchers instead used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure neural correlates of rhythm cognition, including beat perception. The researchers presented two rhesus monkeys with a rhythmic sequence in two versions: an isochronous version that was acoustically accented in such a way that it could induce a duple metre (like a march), and a jittered version using the same acoustically accented sequence but presented in a randomly timed fashion so as to disable beat induction.

No evidence of beat perception

The results showed that monkeys are sensitive to the isochrony of the stimulus, but not its metrical structure. This so-called mismatch negativity (MMN) was influenced by the isochrony of the stimulus, resulting in a larger MMN in the isochronous as opposed to the jittered condition. However, the MMN for both monkeys revealed no interaction between metrical position and isochrony. Honing: ‘Even though the monkey brain appears to be sensitive to the isochrony of the stimulus, we couldn’t find any evidence in support of beat perception.’

The findings further strengthen the Gradual Audiomotor Evolution (GAE) hypothesis (Merchant& Honing 2014), which suggests ‘beat perception’ to be gradually developed in primates, peaking in humans but present only with limited properties in other non-human primates. The GAE is an alternative to the well-known ‘vocal learning hypothesis’, which suggests that only species who can mimic sounds share the ability for beat induction.

Publication details

Henkjan Honing, Fleur L. Bouwer, Luis Prado and Hugo Merchant, ‘Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) sense isochrony in rhythm, but not the beat: additional support for the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis’ in Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16 July, 2018. Doi: 10.3389/fnins.2018.00475

Join the 2017 real-time beat tracking competition?

Foot-tapping shoe competition at the 1994 ICMC in Aarhus, Denmark.

In 1994 we organized at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) a foot-tapping competition on the computational modeling of beat perception.  Several researchers had their latest models control a mechanical shoe, while listening to a variety of national anthems. (See the Dutch Clog in action in the picture above, and below the original prototype.)

At an upcoming IEEE conference a similar challenge will be held. I'm quite exited about that. It is intriguing to see that a skill that is apparently so trivial for humans continues to be a challenge for machines (cf. Honing, 2013).

A prototype tapping in the P.C.Hoofthuis at the
University of Amsterdam in 1993.

The goal of the IEEE challenge is to implement a real-time beat tracker on an embedded platform and to demonstrate the performance with a creative output such as, but not limited to, drumming, dancing, or flickering lights. It is challenging to perform beat tracking in real time because the complete signal is not available. It is also challenging because there can be a wide variety of musical input and the system needs to perform well on all of them. For more information on why beat perception / beat tracking is interesting, see Dan Levitin's This is your brain on music, cited in the IEEE Cup Challenge document.

Important Dates: November 7, 2016 - Registration Deadline
March 5-9, 2017 - Final Competition at ICASSP 2017

Detailed information can be found here.

Honing, H. (2013) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4228-0.

Visiting the The University of Tokyo and Primate Research Institute in Inuyama

I had a wonderful few days in Tokyo for a small symposium and workshop organized by Kazua Okanoya (e.g., ten Cate & Okanoya, 2012) and a full day at the Kyoto Primate Research Institute as a guest of Yuko Hattori (e.g., Hattori et al., 2013, Hattori et al., 2015)

In Tokyo I met with several researchers working on rhythm, time perception and music, including Shinichi Furuya (Sophia University, Japan), Yoshimasa Seki (Aichi University, Japan), Noriko Katsu (Osaka University, Japan), Florian Waszak (Université Paris Descartes, France), and Kazuo Okanoya (Department of Life Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan). It was a great afternoon that was wrapped up with a diner in a local restaurant were, in a round of introductions of the about twenty people that were present, there was Nō singing, Japanse rap and a tenor version of Ave Maria! For abstracts of the workshop see here.

A few days later I visited the Primate Research Institute (KUPRI) in Inuyama. Yuko Hattori was a superb host, showing me the elaborate facilities and allowing me to attend several ongoing experiments on visual and auditory cognition. I met with Ai, Ayumu and Akira and several other chimpansees well-known from the literature (see earlier blogs). Meeting Ai for the first time, after reading so much about her, was quite an emotional moment. See Ai doing one of her famous experiments below:

 Try to remember the position of the numbers on the screen, and then tap them out in ascending order. First you see me doing the task, and then Ai. Impressive, not?

Hattori, Y., Tomonaga, M., & Matsuzawa, T. (2013). Spontaneous synchronized tapping to an auditory rhythm in a chimpanzee Scientific Reports, 3 DOI: 10.1038/srep01566

Hattori, Y., Tomonaga, M., & Matsuzawa, T. (2015). Distractor Effect of Auditory Rhythms on Self-Paced Tapping in Chimpanzees and Humans PLOS ONE, 10 (7) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0130682

ten Cate, C., & Okanoya, K. (2012). Revisiting the syntactic abilities of non-human animals: natural vocalizations and artificial grammar learning Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367 (1598), 1984-1994 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0055

Kun je ritmegevoel trainen? (2/5) [Dutch]

Ben jij een hork op de dansvloer? Er is nog hoop! Een college waarin door middel van geluidstestjes getest wordt hoe ons gehoor werkt als het aankomt op ritme- en maatgevoel. Heeft dit te maken met culturele achtergrond? Of juist erfelijke aanleg?

Voor de andere lezingen zie hier.

Bronnen:

01:00 Phillips-Silver et al. (2011); Mathias et al. (in press)
01:30 Hannon & Trehub (2005)
09:00 Large & Jones (1999); Honing (2006)

Phillips-Silver, J., Toiviainen, P., Gosselin, N., Piché, O., Nozaradan, S., Palmer, C., & Peretz, I. (2011). Born to dance but beat deaf: A new form of congenital amusia Neuropsychologia, 49 (5), 961-969 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.02.002

Mathias et al. (in press)

Hannon, E., & Trehub, S. (2005). Metrical Categories in Infancy and Adulthood Psychological Science, 16 (1), 48-55 DOI: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00779.x

Large, E., & Jones, M. (1999). The dynamics of attending: How people track time-varying events. Psychological Review, 106 (1), 119-159 DOI: 10.1037//0033-295X.106.1.119

Honing, H. (2006). Computational Modeling of Music Cognition: A Case Study on Model Selection Music Perception, 23 (5), 365-376 DOI: 10.1525/mp.2006.23.5.365

Differences in rhythm perception between human and non-human primates

[Press Release University of Amsterdam]  Despite their genetic proximity, human and non-human primates differ in their capacity for beat induction, which is the ability to perceive a regular pulse in music or auditory stimuli and accordingly align motor skills by way of foot-tapping or dancing.

Also referred to as ‘rhythmic entrainment’, this ability is specific to humans and certain bird species, but is surprisingly enough not obvious in non-human primates. These are the findings of researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), whose new hypothesis, the ‘gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis’, was recently published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis

The gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis accommodates the fact that non-human primates’ (i.e., macaques) performance is comparable to humans in single interval tasks such as interval reproduction, categorisation and interception, but show differences in multiple interval tasks such as rhythmic entrainment, synchronisation and continuation. The hypothesis is also in line with the observation that macaques can apparently synchronise in the visual domain, but show less sensitivity in the auditory domain. Finally, while macaques are sensitive to interval-based timing and rhythmic grouping, the absence of strong coupling between the auditory and motor system of non-human primates might explain  why macaques cannot rhythmically entrain in the way humans do.

Timing networks in the primate brain

Functional imaging studies in humans have revealed that the motor cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical circuit (mCBGT) is not only involved  in sequential and temporal processing, but also in rhythmic behaviours such as music and dance, where auditory modality plays a critical role. The mCBGT circuit, however, seems to be less engaged in audiomotor integration in monkeys than in humans. While in humans different cognitive mechanisms are active for interval-based timing versus beat-based timing, with beat perception being dependent on distinct parts of the timing network in the brain, the anterior prefrontal CBGT and the mCBGT circuits in monkeys might be less viable to multiple interval structures, such as a regular beat.

Recent findings weaken the vocal learning hypothesis

The gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis is an alternative to the well-known ‘vocal learning hypothesis’, which suggests that only species who can mimic sounds share the ability for  beat induction. Because recent empirical findings have challenged this hypothesis, an alternative was needed. 

Publication details

Merchant, H., & Honing, H. (2014; online). Are non-human primates capable of rhythmic entrainment? Evidence for the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7 (274) 1-8. doi 10.3389/fnins.2013.00274

Honing, H., & Merchant, H. (in press). Differences in auditory timing between human and non-human primates. Behavioral and Brain Science.

Can we borrow your ears?

Fleur Bouwer, from the Music Cognition Group at the University of Amsterdam, traveled to Canada a few weeks ago to start-up an ambitious experiment on rhythm perception in collaboration with the group of Jessica Grahn, the Music Neuroscience Lab at Western University in London, Ontario. In preparation for a larger fMRI study she invites listeners to join an online pilot study. Interested?

The study involves listening to and rating rhythms online. The entire study will take up to 1 hour to complete and you can participate at a time and location of your convenience. You can also take the experiment in short blocks and take breaks in between. To participate, you need a computer with an Internet connection and loudspeakers or headphones.

The online experiment can be found at this link.

'Vocal mimicry hypothesis' falsified? [Part 2]

Figure (a) Ai tapped C4, (b) Ai tapped C5, (c) Time sequence of a test trial.

A few entries ago I uploaded a fragment from a study (Hattori et al., 2013) that discusses an intriguing experiment with three chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) which were trained to tap regularly on a piano keyboard.

While the video below is convincing, the study reports that only one of the three chimps participating in the experiment was able to do the task: a chimp named Ai (See video).  Furthermore, Ai was only able to synchronize with stimuli at a rate of 600 ms (and not at rates of 400 or 500 ms). In addition, Ai did this in reaction (positive asynchrony) and not in anticipation of the beat (negative asynchrony).

This is similar to what has been found in studies with macaques (Zarco et al., 2009; Konoike et al., 2012) that also seem to opt for a strategy of to react instead of anticipating to a regular beat. All this in contrast with humans that can intentionally synchronize their tapping to various rates (ranging roughly from 200 ms to 1800 ms) of a varying rhythmic stimulus (and not simply a metronome) while showing a negative synchronization error, i.e. in anticipation of the beat.

Another point of a more methodological nature is that the experimentators used, next to sound, what they called 'light navigation' (see diagram above), a visual cue for the chimps to 'remind them' of which key to press. While the authors write "it was unlikely that the visual stimuli affected tapping rhythm by chimpanzees" we can not be sure this is evidence for rhythmic entrainment in the auditory domain.

Nevertheless, with behavioral methods that rely on overt motoric responses it is difficult to separate between the contribution of perception and action (beat perception vs beat production). This makes electrophysiological measures (such as event-related potentials) a more direct and hence attractive alternative. The latter method has been shown a worthwhile, non-invasive alternative in studying cognitive and neural processing in primates (see, e.g., Ueno et al., 2009) and it was used recently in a study probing beat perception in macaques (Honing, Merchant et al., 2012).*

And lastly, these and earlier observations have lead to the auditory timing dissociation hypothesis (Honing, Merchant et al., 2012). This hypothesis accommodates the fact that nonhuman primates performance is comparable to humans in single interval tasks (such as interval reproduction, categorization and interception), but differs substantively in multiple interval tasks (such as rhythmic entrainment, synchronization and continuation).

* N.B. We are eager to collaborate with a primate lab that is willing to do such a relatively simple listening experiment using EEG with chimpanzees; Would be great to compare the results we now have for human adults, newborns, and macaques with the perception of Great Apes ! Feel free to email me :-)

Hattori, Y., Tomonaga, M., & Matsuzawa, T. (2013). Spontaneous synchronized tapping to an auditory rhythm in a chimpanzee. Scientific Reports, 3 DOI: 10.1038/srep01566.

Hasegawa, A., Okanoya, K., Hasegawa, T., & Seki, Y. (2011). Rhythmic synchronization tapping to an audio–visual metronome in budgerigars Scientific Reports, 1 DOI: 10.1038/srep00120

Honing, H., Merchant, H., Háden, G., Prado, L., & Bartolo, R. (2012). Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) detect rhythmic groups in music, but not the beat. PLoS ONE, 7 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0051369

Are monkeys capable of rhythmic entrainment?

Hugo Merchant Lab

On Friday 24 May 2013  Hugo Merchant (Institute of Neurobiology, Querétaro, Mexico) will give a CSCA Lecture with the title Neurophysiology of temporal and sequential processing during a synchronization-continuation tapping task. He will present a recent study investigating rhythmic entrainment in Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).

A recent study has shown that Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) are able to spontaneously synchronize their arm movements when they are paired and facing each other, suggesting that monkeys can coordinate their actions in a social setting and establish some level of rhythmic entrainment (Nagasaka et al., 2013; see earlier entry). However, the asynchronies between the pairs of tapping monkeys are positive, largely dependent on the visual input that the other monkey provides, and with little influence on the sounds that the monkeys made when tapping. The question remains of whether more closer human relatives such as the great apes, show a more sophisticated ability for rhythmic entrainment than macaques.

Macaca mulatta

Hugo Merchant will present a recent study in which two monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were trained in a synchronization-continuation tapping paradigm called a synchronization-continuation tapping task (SCT) in which auditory (A) or visual (V) cues were presented to construct the periodic target interval ranging from 0.45 to 1 second. Initially, animals synchronized their arm movements with a sensory cue by tapping on a push-button, followed by self-pacing of the target interval when the metronome was switched-off. In addition, the monkeys performed a single interval reproduction task (SIRT). We recorded the single-cell activity of 1500 neurons from the macaque medial premotor cortex (MPC) during the task performance.

The results suggest that distinct populations of cells in the MPC can encode different temporal and sequential aspects of the SCT and suggest that MPC is part of a core timing network that uses interval tuning as a signal to represent temporal processing in a variety of behavioral contexts where time is explicitly quantified.

Location: room DS.02, REC D, Nieuwe Achtergracht 129 (entrance through REC G, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130), Amsterdam.

Time: 16:00 - 17:00 hrs, followed by informal drinks. Registration is not necessary.

For more information, see the website of the CSCA.

Nagasaka, Y., Chao, Z., Hasegawa, N., Notoya, T., & Fujii, N. (2013). Spontaneous synchronization of arm motion between Japanese macaques Scientific Reports, 3 DOI: 10.1038/srep01151

Can the origins of music be studied at all?

What was the role of music in the evolutionary history of human beings? And is it possible at all, you might wonder, to study this empirically, given the fact that neither music nor musicality fossilises?* So, better forget about it?

One potential strategy to address this question is to focus on the cognitive traits that could have contributed to the origins of music and musicality (cf. Honing & Ploeger, 2012) and see in how far we share these with other animals.

While there has been quite some critique on this idea – i.e. the apparent impossibility of studying the evolution of complex cognitive processes such as intelligence (Lewontin, 1998; Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009)–, a bottom-up approach, in which one looks for the basic mechanisms that combine into a complex cognitive trait – in our case musicality –, seems an alternative and potentially fruitful way to proceed.

While it is not uncommon to see certain cognitive functions as typically human (such as language), it could well be that there are more species than just humans that have the proper predispositions for music to emerge, species that share with us one or more basic mechanisms that make up musicality. The mere fact that music did not emerge in some species is no evidence that the trait of musicality is absent. In that sense a ‘bottom-up perspective’ (cf. de Waal & Ferrari, 2010) that focuses on the constituent capacities underlying a larger cognitive trait, in our case musicality, is a feasible alternative strategy to follow.

So, instead of studying a complex cognitive trait (such as intelligence) in this approach one explores the basic processes that make up that trait. And in the case at hand: instead of asking which species are musical, the question becomes: how does musicality actually work? What are the necessary ingredients of musicality, and how did these evolve?

It's these questions that will be the focus of the Distinguished Lorentz Fellowship in the coming year at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies and the topic of an international workshop at the Lorentz Center. I'm looking forward to it!

*N.B. the oldest music-related artifact currently known is dated ca. 43,000 old, quite meaningless on an evolutionary scale of million of years.

Bolhuis, J., & Wynne, C. (2009). Can evolution explain how minds work? Nature, 458 (7240), 832-833 DOI: 10.1038/458832a

Honing, H., & Ploeger, A. (2012). Cognition and the Evolution of Music: Pitfalls and Prospects Topics in Cognitive Science, 4 (4), 513-524 DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01210.x

Lewontin, R.C. (1998). The evolution of cognition: Questions we will never answer. In D. Scarborough & S. Sternberg (Eds.), Methods, models, and conceptual issues: An invitation to cognitive science, Vol. 4 (pp. 107-132). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

de Waal, F., & Ferrari, P. (2010). Towards a bottom-up perspective on animal and human cognition Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14 (5), 201-207 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2010.03.003

A case of congenital beat deafness? [Part 2]

Isabelle Peretz, Co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), told me about Mathieu during a workshop at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in November 2009. She was very excited, and I couldn’t but share her enthusiasm: She was pretty sure she found a beat-deaf person.

'Mathieu was discovered through a recruitment of subjects who felt they could not keep the beat in music, such as in clapping in time at a concert or dancing in a club. Mathieu was the only clear-cut case among volunteers who reported these problems. Despite a lifelong love of music and dancing, and musical training including lessons over several years in various instruments, voice, dance and choreography, Mathieu complained that he was unable to find the beat in music. Participation in music and dance activities, while pleasurable, had been difficult for him.' (from Phillips-Silver et al., 2011)

About one year later her group published a journal paper presenting some behavioral evidence that Mathieu was a case of congenital beat deafness.

The questions posted in a blog entry just after the publication of that study resulted in a collaboration in which next to behavioral also direct electrophysiological methods were used. Pascale Lidji (also associated with BRAMS) did an EEG/ERP experiment, modeled after our earlier Amsterdam experiments, to directly probe Mathieu’s apparent beat-deafness.

Last week we had a teleconference discussing the first experimental results (filmed by a Dutch TV crew following our work). These suggest that Mathieu’s brain did pick-up the beat, but his conscious perception did not, as several behavioral experiments confirmed. Intriguing, to say the least.

See below for some fragments from the teleconference:


And the trailer announcing the tv program to be broadcasted next week:


For more information, see the Labyrint tv website.

N.B. There will be a live broadcasted napraatsessie that can be viewed at www.labyrint.nl.

Phillips-Silver, J., Toiviainen, P., Gosselin, N., Piché, O., Nozaradan, S., Palmer, C., & Peretz, I. (2011). Born to dance but beat deaf: A new form of congenital amusia Neuropsychologia DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.02.002

Is beat induction species-specific? [Part 2]

It is a slowly but steadily unfolding story, with more and more evidence in support of it: The story revealing with what other species we share beat induction, a skill that is argued to be fundamental to music.

The ability to synchronize to the beat of the music has been demonstrated in several parrot species and, apparently, one elephant species, supporting the vocal learning and rhythmic synchronization hypothesis, which posits that vocal learning provides a neurobiological foundation for auditory–motor entrainment.

While earlier experiments with parrots and related animals were criticized mainly for their relatively informal setup (e.g. using existing YouTube videos or analyzing home-made video’s), a few weeks ago an elegant and systematic study appeared in Nature Scientific Reports in which budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulates), a vocal-learning parrot species, were trained to synchronize to a metronome. A study that can be considered an important first step towards understanding the timing control mechanism in vocal learners.



Video example of budgerigar doing a tapping task (Source).

Unfortunately, they were trained only to a (visual and auditory) metronome, and not a rhythmically varying acoustic signal (read: music), so we are still not sure this is indeed a case of beat induction. And is the bird in the video not simply reacting, instead of anticipating (predicting negative phase) as humans do?

Also, to be real support for the vocal learning (or vocal mimicking) hypothesis, additional experiments are still needed. Most notably an experiment that tests whether related species that are not vocal learners, such as doves, are incapable of the learning that the budgerigars show. (I know that at least one cognitive biologist is willing to pick up the glove :-)

Hasegawa, A., Okanoya, K., Hasegawa, T., & Seki, Y. (2011). Rhythmic synchronization tapping to an audio–visual metronome in budgerigars Scientific Reports, 1 DOI: 10.1038/srep00120

Is beat induction species-specific? [Part 1]

Beat induction (BI) is the cognitive skill that allows us to hear a regular pulse in music to which we can then synchronize. Perceiving this regularity in music allows us to dance and make music together. As such it can be considered a fundamental musical trait that, arguably, played a decisive role in the origin of music (see also earlier entries of this blog). Furthermore, BI has been argued to be a spontaneously developing, domain-specific and species-specific skill.

With regard to the first aspect, recent studies with infants and newborns provide some evidence suggesting such early bias (Honing et al., 2009). With regard to the second aspect convincing evidence is still lacking, although it was recently argued that BI does not play a role (or is even avoided) in spoken language (Patel, 2008). And with regard to the latter aspect, it was recently suggested that we might share BI with a selected group of bird species (Fitch, 2009) and not with more closely related species such as nonhuman primates.(Zarco et al., 2009). This is surprising when one assumes a close mapping between specific genotypes and specific cognitive traits. However, more and more studies show that genetically distantly related species can show similar cognitive skill, and this offers a rich basis for comparative studies of this specific cognitive function.

Most animal studies have used behavioral methods to probe the presence (or absence) of BI, such as tapping tasks or measuring head bobs. It might well be that if more direct electrophysiological measures are used (such as analogs of the MMN), nonhuman primates might indeed also show BI.

Its this hypothesis that that is the topic of a new and exiting collaboration of our group with that of Hugo Merchant at the Institute of Neurobiology in Querétaro, Mexico. This week we started a series of experiments with Rhesus Macaques using the same paradigm we used in our earlier newborn studies.



Fitch, W. (2009). Biology of Music: Another One Bites the Dust Current Biology, 19 (10) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.04.004

Honing H, Ladinig O, Háden GP, & Winkler I (2009). Is beat induction innate or learned? Probing emergent meter perception in adults and newborns using event-related brain potentials. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169, 93-6 PMID: 19673760

Patel, A. D. (2008). Music, language, and the brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zarco, W., Merchant, H., Prado, L., & Mendez, J. (2009). Subsecond Timing in Primates: Comparison of Interval Production Between Human Subjects and Rhesus Monkeys Journal of Neurophysiology, 102 (6), 3191-3202 DOI: 10.1152/jn.00066.2009

A case of congenital beat deafness?

Of most people that claim things like ‘Oh, but I’m not musical at all’, ‘I’m hopeless at keeping a tune’ or ‘I have no sense of rhythm’, only a small percentage turn out to be unmusical. The condition is known as amusia, and those who suffer from it are literally music-deficient. It is a rather exceptional, mostly inherited condition that comprises a range of handicaps in recognising or reproducing melodies and rhythms. It has been estimated that about 4 per cent of the people in Western Europe and North America have problems in this direction, to a greater or lesser degree. The most common handicap is tone-deafness or dysmelodia: the inability or difficulty in hearing the difference between two separate melodies.

To diagnose amusia, the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) has been developed. This test is available online – but wait a while before trying it out :-) People who say: ‘I can’t hold a note,’ ‘I sing out of tune,’ or ‘I have no sense of rhythm,’ are not necessarily suffering from amusia. Such people often confuse poor singing or dancing skills with the absence of a sense of hearing differences in melodies and rhythms. For instance, clapping a complex rhythm or dancing to the music requires quite some practice. Nevertheless, almost all of us can hear the differences between rhythms. It has been established that, even in people who are diagnosed as being tone-deaf, about half of them have a normal sense for rhythm (Peretz & Hyde, 2003).

Jessica Phillips-Silver (Université de Montréal, Canada) and a dream-team of music cognition experts found a person that claims to have truly no sense for rhythm, or, more precisely, is apparently deaf to hearing regularity in music. They describe their results in an upcoming issue of Neuropsychologia.

All tests presented in this intriguing study indeed hint at a person that has a true deficit in picking up the regularity in music (the ‘beat’ or regular pulse).

However, as with other studies on beat induction, it has proven to be very difficult to support the presence or absence of this skill on judging overt behavior such as dancing (see earlier entries on, e.g., Snowball). The study presents one (non-standard) perceptual test on beat perception, and I’m surprised the researchers did not use a relatively simple and far more direct test to see if beat induction is present or absent in this participant, such as the MMN paradigm used in work with newborns (e.g., Honing et al., 2009) or other recent studies making use of brain imaging methods. Would make a great follow-up paper.*

Phillips-Silver, J., Toiviainen, P., Gosselin, N., Piché, O., Nozaradan, S., Palmer, C., & Peretz, I. (2011). Born to dance but beat deaf: A new form of congenital amusia Neuropsychologia DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.02.002

Peretz, I. & Hyde, K. (2003). What is specific to music processing? Insights from congenital amusia Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7 (8), 362-367 DOI: 10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00150-5

Honing, H., Ladinig, O., Háden, G., & Winkler, I. (2009). Is Beat Induction Innate or Learned? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169 (1), 93-96 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04761.x

* In fact, we started working on it this summer (Lidji, Palmer, Honing & Peretz, in preparation)

Is beat induction innate or learned?

This week a short entry with a selection of discussions related to the newborn study mentioned in last months entry.

• Discussion at ScienceNews by Bruce Bower.
  
• Discussion at Wired by Brandon Keim.
  
• Interview at WNYC Public Radio by John Schaefer: [soundfile]
• Report by Science Update by Bob Hirshon: [soundfile]
• Report by NewScientist by Hazel Muir, video by Sandrine Ceurstemont:
  

For more media attention see Google news.

Winkler, I., Haden, G., Ladinig, O., Sziller, I., & Honing, H. (2009). Newborn infants detect the beat in music Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (7), 2468-2471 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809035106

Do infants prefer music over speech?

In this weeks online edition of PNAS Marcel Zentner and Tuomas Eerola report on a study in which they carried out two experiments with a total of 120 infants, aged between 5 and 24 months. The infants were exposed to various musical and rhythmic stimuli, including isochronous drumbeats. Control stimuli consisted of adult- and infant-directed speech. The researchers could show that infants engage significantly more in rhythmic movement to music, and other rhythmically regular sounds, than to speech. The findings are suggestive of a predisposition for rhythmic movement in response to music and other metrically regular sounds. The study also adds to the existing evidence that infants have a liking and preference for rhythmical music from day one, a predisposition that preceeds language.

Zentner, M., & Eerola, T. (2010). Rhythmic engagement with music in infancy Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1000121107