Processing of rhythmic structures in adults and newborn babies
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1
Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
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2
Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
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3
Music Cognition Group, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
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4
First Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Semmelweis University, Hungary
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5
Institute of Psychology, University of Szeged, Hungary
Rhythm perception, an arguably uniquely human trait is based upon beat and meter induction. Beat induction is the detection of a regular pulse in an auditory signal. Two or more hierarchically structured beats with different periodicities define a meter. Whether beat induction is innate or learned during early development and whether or not meter induction requires extensive musical training are controversial issues in the literature. Because the beat (or pulse) in music is an auditory regularity, the MMN component, known to be elicited by regularity violations can be used to answer these questions.
We created a simple rock drum accompaniment by concatenating long sequences using four fully metrical variants of the same 8-position base pattern and recorded ERPs from adults and newborn babies to omissions violating the regular rhythm. In neonates, omission of the downbeat (the first position of the rhythmic pattern) elicited MMN like brain activity. This result can be interpreted as supporting the notion of innate beat induction. Non musician adults faster and more accurately detected the omitted downbeat than an omission occurring at a lower level position of the proposed hierarchical structure of the rhythm (often referred to as ‘meter’). This result confirms the hypothesis that links theoretical metrical structure with perceptual salience. The latency and amplitude of the MMN elicited by the same omissions mirrored the perceptual results (earlier and higher amplitude MMNs elicited by downbeats) whether participants attended a movie without sound (passive condition) or detected sound intensity changes in a parallel noise stream (unattended condition). These results indicate that a hierarchical representation of rhythm was pre attentively formed in participants without extensive musical training.
Conference:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Symposium 4: Music and musical development
Citation:
Háden
GP,
Ladinig
O,
Sziller
I,
Honing
H and
Winkler
I
(2009). Processing of rhythmic structures in adults and newborn babies.
Conference Abstract:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.083
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Received:
25 Mar 2009;
Published Online:
25 Mar 2009.
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Correspondence:
Gabor P Háden, Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, Hungary.ghaden@cogsci.bme.hu