Every human society has a capacity to comprehend and engage with music. Our musical behavior appears to be different within the animal kingdom than other creatures.
A new study shows that singing has a distinct neural signature when compared to speech or instrumental music.
It's not easy to get a look at the brain.
To get a precise picture of what happens in the brains as people hear sounds, researchers used a technique called electrocorticography, where electrodes are placed within the skull to record electrical activity from the brain.
The type of data gathered from ECoG is much more precise than other techniques of measuring brain activity because the electrodes are placed directly on the brain, and they measure electrical activity rather than where blood is flowing in the brain, which is a proxy for neuron activity.
Researchers gathered data from patients who were already undergoing surgeries to treat seizure, so that they could learn more about the procedure.
Seizure patients can be monitored for days before surgery by placing electrodes in their brain. If the patients agree, they can take part in studies where they have their brain activity recorded while performing certain tasks.
The task involved listening to 165 sounds, ranging from the sound of a mobile phone to a man speaking to a keyboard. Music with singing and instrumental music were included in the mix.
Fascinatingly, researchers found a distinct population of neurons that responded specifically to singing, with this population differing from the neural representations of instrumental music and speech more generally.
The key novel finding is that one of the components responded to music with singing. The authors say that this finding indicates that the human brain contains a neural population specific to the analysis of song.
The findings suggest that music is represented by multiple distinct neural populations, and one of which responds specifically to singing.
The researchers theorize about the characteristics of singing that make it a distinct category in need of its own signature.
Singing is distinguished from speech by its melodic intonation and rhythmicity and from instrumental music by vocal resonances and other voice-specific structure. The authors suggest that a natural hypothesis is that song-selective neural populations integrate across multiple features that differentiate singing from speech and music.
The researchers combined their data from the previous study with the ECoG data to get a better idea of the location of the neural activity.
Josh McDermott, an MIT cognitive neuroscientist who co-authored the study, says that this way of combining ECoG and fMRI is a significant methodological advance.
The research shows how our brains represent music. The novel technique of combining ECoG and fMRI data could help answer some questions, such as how neural music and song selectivity arose over the course of our development or evolution.
Current Biology has published this research.
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