Have you ever found yourself intuitively tapping your foot or drumming your fingers to a specific beat or melody playing through your headphones? Can you relate to that indescribable feeling when your favorite drop comes and you can literally feel every note and vibration resonating within you? While electronic dance music possesses the unwavering ability to unite people of all cultures and backgrounds, it seems the depth to which you truly “feel” the music around you might be a lot deeper than you think.
Researchers from New York University tasked with studying our perception of notes and melodies have recently discovered that rhythms detected within the brain match those found within the music we listen to. Keith Doelling, the study’s lead author, suggests that the brain’s cortical oscillations – which are rhythmic or repetitive neural activities in the central nervous system – play a fundamental role in the detection of musical sequences. “We’ve isolated the rhythms in the brain that match rhythms in music,” Doelling explains, “Specifically, our findings show that the presence of these rhythms enhances our perception of music and of pitch changes.” This discovery builds on prior research which seemed to indicate that rhythms within the brain synchronize precisely with speech, enabling us to process continuous speech despite breaks and punctuation.
Not surprisingly, the study also found that musicians have acuter oscillatory mechanisms than non-musicians, suggesting that musical training can improve the efficiency of our auditory-detection systems. Trained musicians brain rhythms were found to synchronize with unusually slow clips of music (half a note per second), to be more synchronized to the musical rhythms and to more accurately detect pitch distortions in comparison to their non-musical counterparts. For what it’s worth, it’s interesting to see just how much music can impact our biological and psychological selves. Maybe that’s what makes festivals such a euphoric and unifying experience; hundreds of thousands of people connected, their brain waves synchronized to the same rhythm.
Source: New York University