Dr Sylvie Nozaradan from MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Australia & Institute of Neuroscience, UCLouvain, Belgium will give a talk on rhythm and brains.

17.11.2020 | Hella Kastbjerg

TITLE
Rhythm and brains: insights from frequency-tagging

ABSTRACT
Music powerfully compels us to move to the musical rhythm, showcasing the remarkable ability of humans to perceive and produce rhythmic inputs. There is a wave of current research exploring the neural bases of this rhythmic entrainment in both human and non-human animals, in evolutionary terms and in development. One way to investigate these neural dynamics is surface or intracerebral electroencephalography (EEG) combined with frequency-tagging. This approach has been developed over the past ten years with the input of a number of researchers in the field, and has proved to be a well-suited method to capture the specific transformations between rhythmic inputs, neural activity and body movement in a variety of experimental settings.

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 shape the rhythmic input by systematically amplifying specific subset of frequencies, thus yielding some sort of "periodization" of the input. This selective enhancement seems to correlate with perception and individual ability to move in time with musical rhythm, and cannot be explained by acoustic features or low-level auditory subcortical processing of the rhythmic input.  These different results may lead to a new understanding of the neural bases of rhythmic entrainment.

BIO
Sylvie Nozaradan, MD PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Neuroscience of UCLouvain, Belgium since September 2018. The same year, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council to develop her research on rhythm and the brain. Previously, she received an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council to develop her research for three years at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University (Australia). She has a PhD degree in neuroscience from UCLouvain and the BRAMS, Montreal (Canada), for her work on neural entrainment to musical rhythm. She has a dual background in music (Master in piano, Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, Belgium) and science (medical doctor, UCLouvain).

ZOOM
The talk takes place on the Zoom platform. Please contact hella.kastbjerg@clin.au.dk to receive the link.