A recording of a lecture by dr Ani Patel from the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, including an exposé on why beat induction (and/or synchronizing to a beat) might be special to 'musical animals':
Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038
Are auditory representations a result of temporal predictions?
Last month an interesting review was published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences arguing that ‘predictive representations of temporal regularities constitute the core of auditory objects in the brain.’ A possible consequence of this argument is that auditory sensory memory and (temporal) predictions are simply two sides of the same coin.
The authors (among which István Winkler and Sue Denham that collaborated with our Amsterdam group in the EmCAP project; see earlier blogs), review much of the recent literature using brain imaging and electrophysiological techniques. They support their hypothesis on the basis of at least five observations (and I paraphrase the authors here):
First, auditory regularity representations are temporally persistent; they have been shown to connect sounds separated by up to circa 10 seconds and persist for at least 30 seconds.
Second, auditory regularity representations encode all sound features with a resolution comparable to perception, since perceptually discriminable deviations elicit a Mismatch Negativity (MMN).
Third, when two sound streams are perceptually separated, MMN reflects the perceived sound organization, its elicitation dynamically follows perceptual fluctuations between two alternative sound organizations and the effects of priming sequences on perception.
Fourth, regularities are extracted from acoustically widely different exemplars in a sequence, including the natural variation of environmental sounds.
And finally, violations of predictive rules have been shown to elicit the MMN. For example, delivering a low tone after a short one elicited the MMN, when for most tones the rule “short tones are followed by high-pitched tones, long tones by low-pitched tones” held.
Interestingly, violations in the form of silence (i.e. no sound) - such as omissions in a natural drum-pattern - also show a MMN. And in addition, these effects are also found when attention is directed to other aspects than the sound /music or when participants are unattentive (such as in the case with sleeping neonates).
Winkler, I., Denham, S., & Nelken, I. (2009). Modeling the auditory scene: predictive regularity representations and perceptual objects Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13 (12), 532-540 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.09.003
This week a brief update consisting of a short interview with Ani Patel (Senior Fellow at the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, US) at a conference workshop at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) talking about Snowball: the dancing cockatoo that gracefully helped boosting the visibility of research in the neuroscience and cognition of music.
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
Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038
Afgelopen zondagochtend gaf ik een kinderlezing in het Nemo, Amsterdam voor kinderen van acht tot twaalf jaar. Wat is dat leuk!
Op de vraag Wie is er muzikaal? staken in eerste instantie ongeveer vijftien kinderen hun vinger op. Slechts een paar kinderen vonden zichzelf absoluut niet muzikaal, en bijna iedereen kende wel iemand die niet muzikaal is. 'Mijn papa zingt heel vals!', riep iemand.
Aan het einde van de lezing vroeg ik nog een keer wie zichzelf muzikaal vond en toen gingen bijna alle vingers omhoog. Missie geslaagd :-)
Voor een verslag van de kinderlezing van Edda Heinsman, met foto’s van Hanne Nijhuis, zie hier.
This year several new insights were published on the phenomenon of beat induction.* Beat induction is the cognitive skill that allows us to hear a regular pulse in music to which we can synchronize. It allows us to dance and make music together. Hence it is considered a skill that must have contributed to the origins of music. Without it, making music would be quite difficult.
Most of these recent studies try to support (or falsify) the criteria that beat induction, as a cognitive skill that allows for music, should fulfill — it should at least be a) special to music (domain-specific), b) develop spontaneously (or be innate), and c) be uniquely human (human-specific).
In earlier blogs I discussed some recent evidence that beat induction is active in newborns, providing support for the innate criterion. This week two new studies appeared in Current Biology challenging the human-specific criterion (see also BBC News or Dutch radio).
The evidence is compelling (and will cost me two bottles of wine). Both the studies of Schachner et al. and Patel et al. show that it is unlikely due to chance that one cockatoo and twentyfive parrots synchronized to music.
Especially Patel and Iversen’s tempo controlled experiment is interesting because there it could be studied whether the cockatoo is actually listening to the music. Although the current paper is only reporting on bouts where the cockatoo synchronized (selected by the researchers !), some tests show this is not simply due to chance. However, synchrony in about ten percent of all recordings is not a lot for a bird that seems to enjoy dancing and almost constantly moves to the music.
Furthermore, it is surprising that Schacher et al. state that none of their bird-subjects was 'explicitly trained to produce movement in response to acoustic material.' This is at least not true for the cockatoo Snowball who was analyzed in both studies. As Patel et al. write, Snowball (likely) learned his foot-lifting behavior from a previous owner making arm movements in synchrony while dancing (to music).
Snowball needs to be in the mood for dancing and has to be enthusiastically spoken too to start him up. It suggests an important role of the owner/trainer being present at the experiment (by the way, it is unclear whether the researchers were actually present at these recording sessions). In addition, during at least half of the experiments the current owner was nodding her head (apparently not systematically influencing the results). It seems Snowball deserves a more formal, yet attractive setting in the near future.
Overall, it makes me interpret these data as learned behavior and a mimicking phenomenon, more than an innate or spontaneously developing form of beat induction that humans have.
Nevertheless, it interesting to think what makes parrots and cockatoos receptive to beat induction, instead of our closer relatives like chimpanzees or bonobo’s? Patel suggests the vocal learning hypothesis: the capacity for entrainment as a by-product of selecting for vocal-mimicking, with both needing modality-specific links between auditory and motor representations. Others believe it is the particular rhythmic chorusing (as a behavior of complex social groups) that is the source of the behavior. I’m currently simply ‘confused’, the best a new empirical finding can do!
Schachner, A., Brady, T., Pepperberg, I., & Hauser, M. (2009). Spontaneous Motor Entrainment to Music in Multiple Vocal Mimicking Species Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.061
Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038
* Beat induction is also referred to as Beat Perception and Synchronization (BPS; Patel, 2008), Sensorimotor Synchronization (SMS; Repp, 2005), or as audio entrainment (cf. Large & Jones, 1999).
It might look somewhat disturbing, but the picture that accompanies this entry is a snapshot of a two day old baby that is healthy and sound asleep! She is one of fourteen newborns that participated in a recent listening experiment, a collaboration between the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and our research group at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In this project we are interested in how newborn infants perceive the musical world around them and in how far certain musical skills are innate.
We know that newborn infants are sensitive to a variety of sounds. But what do they factually hear? Can they make sense of the musical world around them? Do they have a sense of rhythm, arguably one of the fundaments of music?
To study this, we collaborated with a research group in Budapest, Hungary lead by István Winkler, a specialist in auditory perception and one of the pioneers in measuring brain activity in neonates.
Since the start of this European research project (named EmCAP) we talked a lot about how we could take advantage of existing theories in music cognition to study auditory perception in newborn infants, and how to probe their (potential) sense of rhythm. After many pilot studies, and resolving quite a few methodological issues that come with doing experiments with neonates, in the end we opted to use a simple, regular rock rhythm, consisting of hi-hat, snare, and bass drum (see below). We made several variants of this rock rhythm by omitting strokes on non-significant metrical positions (i.e. non-syncopated rhythms in music theoretical terms). We then inserted, once in a while, a 'deviant' segment: the same rhythm but with a missing ‘downbeat’ (i.e. a syncopated rhythm). The result sounded like this [click on the play button; to stop, click again]:
Since it is quite difficult to observe behavioral reactions in newborns a small number of electrodes were carefully glued to the scalp and face of the newborns to be able to measure their electrical brain signals (see photo). N.B. The baby’s were fed just before the measurements with their mother being present during the whole session that lasted twenty minutes.
What did the experiment reveal? Well, shortly after each ‘deviant’ segment began, the babies' brains produced an electrical response indicating that they had expected to hear the downbeat but had not. As such we could show that newborn infants can detect the beat in music (The results will be published this week in PNAS Early Edition).
What are the potential implications of these findings? For me, one of the most important realizations is that a cognitive skill called beat induction, which most of us think of as trivial (e.g., being able to tap your foot to the beat), is active so early in life. It can be seen as additional support for the idea that, beat perception contributed to the origins of music since it enabling such actions as clapping, making music together and dancing to a rhythm. Next to being music-specific, beat induction is also considered to be uniquely human. Even our closest evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee and bonobo, do not synchronize their behavior to rhythmic sounds. This makes the topic of beat induction a fundamental issue in current music cognition research (see, e.g., Patel, 2008:402).
Furthermore, the results challenge some earlier assumptions that beat induction is learned in the first few months of life, for example by parents rocking the infant. Our study suggests that beat perception must be either innate or learned in the womb (as the auditory system is at least partly functional as of approximately three month before birth).
Finally, it should be noted that the auditory capabilities underlying beat induction are also necessary for bootstrapping communication by sounds, allowing infants to adapt to the rhythm of the caretaker’s speech and to find out when to respond to it or to interject their own vocalization. Therefore, although these results are compatible with the notion of the genetic origin of music in humans, they do not provide the final answer in this longstanding debate.
István Winkler, Gábor P. Háden, Olivia Ladinig, István Sziller, Henkjan Honing (2009). Newborn infants detect the beat in music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809035106
This is a short entry with a video impression of the Spinoza te Paard lecture series on recent developments in science, aimed at a general audience. The full broadcast can be viewed at spinozadebat gemist.
This week a podcast from the Guardian on music, the brain, and evolutionary psychology (by James Randerson, Francesca Panetta and Marcus Pearce | guardian). How did music evolve, how is it linked to language, and how is it understood by the brain.
Ian Cross (Cambridge University) talks about how music acts as a social tool. Eric Clarke (Oxford University) talks about musical meaning and why dance music has such a profound effect on a club full of revellers. Adena Schachner (Harvard University) talks about her analyses of birds in relation to beat induction. In addition, snippets of Stefan Koelsch (Sussex University), Ani Patel (Neuroscience Institute, San Diego), Andrea Norton (Harvard Medical School), Geraint Wiggins (Goldsmiths College London) and Paul Robertson (founder and leader of the Medici String Quartet) can be heard.
Beat induction has been a recurring topic on this blog. The topic was also the focus at the opening symposium of the Neurosciences and Music Conference, currently being held in Montreal, Canada. Especially researchers like Jessica A. Grahn (Cognition and Brain Science Unit, Cambridge), Joel S. Snyder (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Ed W. Large (Florida Atlantic University) and John R. Iversen (Neursosciences Institute, San Diego) talked about different aspects of beat perception and synchonization in relation to the structure of the brain.
While there is quite some agreement that auditory rhythm processing is associated with movement and auditory brain areas, also some deeper brain areas were proposed as candidates. An elegant series of studies was presented by Joyce L. Chen (McGill University, Montreal) that went a step further in looking for patterns in how these brain areas might be interrelated. She could show (using a very nice design in which behavioral data informs and helps the analyses of brain imaging data) an intimate linkage between the auditory and premotor brain circuit, a link that was suggested to be “at the core of what links music, movement and language together”.
However, in how far beat induction is special –in the sense that it might be a uniquely human trait (see earlier blog)– is still under much discussion. Ed W. Large (Florida State University) mentioned in his talk yesterday that he is currently testing bonobo’s on having beat induction (Needless to say that he is optimistic on that, but the results will only be published later this year). This morning Aniruddh D. Patel (The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego) presented a poster with the first data of the ‘dancing cockatoo’ (mentioned in an earlier blog). Below a short compilation of some of the recordings that Patel’s group analyzed and presented here at the Neurosciences and Music conference (with the kind permission of Ani Patel):
The video is convincing in suggesting that the cockatoo seems to be really sensitive -at least in these fragments- to the tempo of the music and can be argued to really listen and able to pick up the induced beat. When looking at the actual measurements however, the story is less convincing. Five video’s where recorded, of which three had to be rejected because the experimenter might have moved along while the video was made. In the remaining two video’s ‘successful’ dancing on the beat was ranging between 2.5% to 20% of the trials (an episode of say one minute of dancing). Part of the problem, quite interesting from a methodological and statistical point of view, is how to show that all this is better than chance.
Patel, A.D., et al., . (2008). Investigating the human-specificity of synchronization to music. In: M. Adachi et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Music Perception and Cognition Conference (ICMPC10), Sapporo: Japan / Adelaide: Causal Productions.
This week another fragment of the video that was directed by Bob van Gijzel (AVC/UvA) as part of a series of short films with the title De Fascinatie: Scholars and scientists from the Universiteit van Amsterdam talk about their fascination in research:
The Dutch TV program Boeken introduced the Cockatoo-video as the most fun and intriguing video of the year. Tijs Goldschmidt (a biologist and writer known from, e.g., Darwin's Dreampond) tells about the phenomenon of beat induction and why it is so relevant to cognitive scientists (see also an earlier blog).
In his upcoming book called Music, Language and the Brain, Ani Patel chose beat induction — referring to it as ‘beat-based rhythm processing’— as a key area in music-language research. He proposes it an important candidate in demonstrating "that there is a fundamental aspect of music cognition that is not a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms that also serve other, more clearly adaptive, domains (e.g. auditory scene analysis or language)." (Patel, 2008).
I couldn't agree more: beat induction could well turn out to be a key cognitive process in the evolution of music, and arguably central to the origins of music.*
With regard to the video mentioned above: Patel’s group is currently systematically filming the Cockatoo for analyses.
P.S. Yet another item from Dutch TV on beat induction:
Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038
