To musicians, the message is in the meter pre-attentive neuronal responses to incongruent rhythm are left-lateralized in musicians.
Musicians exchange non-verbal cues as messages when they play together. This is particularly true in music with a sketchy outline. Jazz musicians receive and interpret the cues when performance parts from a regular pattern of rhythm, suggesting that they enjoy a highly developed sensitivity to subtle deviations of rhythm. We demonstrate that pre-attentive brain responses recorded with magnetoencephalography to rhythmic incongruence are left-lateralized in expert jazz musicians and right-lateralized in musically inept non-musicians. The left-lateralization of the pre-attentive responses suggests functional adaptation of the brain to a task of communication, which is much like that of language.
Vuust
Peter
P
Centre for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark. pv@pet.auh.dk
Pallesen
Karen Johanne
KJ
Bailey
Christopher
C
van Zuijen
Titia L
TL
Gjedde
Albert
A
Roepstorff
Andreas
A
Østergaard
Leif
L
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D002909:Chronobiology Phenomena; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music; D015203:Reproducibility of Results