The evolutionary neuroscience of musical beat perception: the Action Simulation for Auditory Prediction (ASAP) hypothesis.

ABSTRACT:

Every human culture has some form of music with a beat

a perceived periodic pulse that structures the perception of musical rhythm and which serves as a framework for synchronized movement to music. What are the neural mechanisms of musical beat perception, and how did they evolve? One view, which dates back to Darwin and implicitly informs some current models of beat perception, is that the relevant neural mechanisms are relatively general and are widespread among animal species. On the basis of recent neural and cross-species data on musical beat processing, this paper argues for a different view. Here we argue that beat perception is a complex brain function involving temporally-precise communication between auditory regions and motor planning regions of the cortex (even in the

SUBMITTER: Patel AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4026735 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature