ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Neural tracking of the musical beat is enhanced by low-frequency sounds.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers.
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Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lateralised neural mechanisms facilitate auditory self-other distinction and coordination in human dyads.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Polyrhythm Perception and Production: A Scoping Review.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Rhythmicity and Trait Absorption Are Linked to Nonordinary States of Consciousness.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Words and Meters: Neural Evidence for a Connection Between Individual Differences in Statistical Learning and Rhythmic Ability in Infancy.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Experience-driven Predictability Does Not Influence Neural Entrainment to the Beat.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Altered Hierarchical Visual Rhythm Tracking in Early Deafness.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- The role of competing grouping patterns and tonal coherence in neural synchronization to musical meter.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Neural representation of the musical beat is facilitated but not contingent on the repetition of rhythmic patterns.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- 4/4 and more, rhythmic complexity more strongly predicts groove in common meters.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Music Therapy for Concussion: A Case Report.Cureus · 2025Article
- Behavior-Relevant Periodized Neural Representation of Acoustic But Not Tactile Rhythm in Humans.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Eye blinks synchronize with musical beats during music listening.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Tempo-dependent selective enhancement of neural responses at the beat frequency can be mimicked by both an oscillator and an evoked model.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Temporal relationship between dancer's body movements and music beats in classical ballet.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Revealing rhythm categorization in human brain activity.Science advances · 2025Article
- Pitch biases sensorimotor synchronization to auditory rhythms.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neural entrainment to the beat and working memory predict sensorimotor synchronization skills.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Measuring self-similarity in empirical signals to understand musical beat perception.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- The strength of neural entrainment to electronic music correlates with proxies of altered states of consciousness.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Music makes us move, and using bass instruments to build the rhythmic foundations of music is especially effective at inducing people to dance to periodic pulse-like beats. Here, we show that this culturally widespread practice may exploit a neurophysiological mechanism whereby low-frequency sounds shape the neural representations of rhythmic input by boosting selective locking to the beat. Cortical activity was captured using electroencephalography (EEG) while participants listened to a regular rhythm or to a relatively complex syncopated rhythm conveyed either by low tones (130 Hz) or high tones (1236.8 Hz). We found that cortical activity at the frequency of the perceived beat is selectively enhanced compared with other frequencies in the EEG spectrum when rhythms are conveyed by bass sounds. This effect is unlikely to arise from early cochlear processes, as revealed by auditory physiological modeling, and was particularly pronounced for the complex rhythm requiring endogenous generation of the beat. The effect is likewise not attributable to differences in perceived loudness between low and high tones, as a control experiment manipulating sound intensity alone did not yield similar results. Finally, the privileged role of bass sounds is contingent on allocation of attentional resources to the temporal properties of the stimulus, as revealed by a further control experiment examining the role of a behavioral task. Together, our results provide a neurobiological basis for the convention of using bass instruments to carry the rhythmic foundations of music and to drive people to move to the beat.
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