Recording
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Abstract
All over the world, music powerfully compels people to move the body in time with the musical rhythm. Importantly, in many music and dance scenarios, individuals spontaneously coordinate periodic body movement even when the rhythm does not contain prominent periodic onsets that cue accurate movement synchronization. This behavior illustrates the ability of humans to coordinate body movement in time with acoustic rhythms with great flexibility compared to other animal species. How is that made possible? When listening to musical rhythm, humans perceive one or several levels of periodic pulses (a meter, for short). These internally represented metric pulses can then be used as a temporal reference for movement coordination. One way to investigate the neural bases of this rhythmic behavior is electroencephalography (EEG) combined with frequency-tagging. This approach has been developed over the past ten years with the input of a number of researchers, and offers a measure of how rhythmic inputs are mapped onto neural activity and body movement. I will present recent experiments conducted in healthy and brain-damaged adults, and also in infants, while exposed to rhythms as diverse as repeated rhythmic patterns or naturalistic music. Results show that neural populations respond to the rhythmic input by systematically amplifying specific subsets of frequencies, thus yielding some sort of "periodization" of the input. This neural enhancement seems to correlate with