title: To musicians, the message is in the meter pre-attentive neuronal responses to incongruent rhythm are left-lateralized in musicians.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark. pv@pet.auh.dk
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Vuust
authors.forename: Karen Johanne
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Pallesen
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bailey
authors.forename: Titia L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: van Zuijen
authors.forename: Albert
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gjedde
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Roepstorff
authors.forename: Leif
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Østergaard
mesh_terms: 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