Rhythm and Brains · How musical rhythm moves humans: functional mechanisms of entrainment and perception-action coupling

Entrainment to music is a culturally widespread activity with increasingly recognized pro-social andtherapeutic effects. Music powerfully compels us to move to the musical rhythm, showcasing theremarkable ability of humans to perceive and produce rhythmic inputs. However, the underlyingfunctional mechanisms remain unknown. One view, which dates back to Darwin, is that the relevantmechanisms are ancient and anchored in the evolutionary oldest subcortical parts of the brain.However, recent research argues that rhythm perception is a complex cognitive function involvingtemporally precise communication between cortical sensory and motor regions, even in the absenceof overt body movement or intention to move.This project aims to uncover these mechanisms by combining concepts and methods ofexperimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, the research will (i) unravel themechanisms at the interface of rhythmic inputs, motor skills and brain activity, (ii) establish theactive role of motor representations in rhythm perception, (iii) track the development of theseprocesses even prior to language in infants, and (iv) investigate the physiopathology and restorationof these processes in brain-damaged patients.To achieve these objectives, the project will use a comparable method across different experimentalsettings, the frequency-tagging approach, whose reliability and advantages have been recentlyestablished as an innovative method to capture neural entrainment to rhythm in humans. Resultswill provide important knowledge into how psychological, environmental and neural mechanismsaffect such entrainment. Clarifying these mechanisms provides an optimal framework to unravel therole of an intrinsic sensory-motor coupling underlying perception and how this coupling developsover the lifespan. It is also critical for optimising clinical rehabilitation practices using music as apowerful non-verbal cross-cultural means of communication.