ArticleRoyal Society open science2018
How does human motor cortex regulate vocal pitch in singers?
Article in Royal Society open science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- Causal Lesion Evidence for Two Motor Speech Coordination Networks in the Brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The cost of language: functionally over-dominant language circuits in the human brain may limit cognitive abilities and non-verbal executive functions.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural control of lexical tone production in human laryngeal motor cortex.Nature communications · 2023Article
- A dual larynx motor networks hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Singers show enhanced performance and neural representation of vocal imitation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Mapping Human Laryngeal Motor Cortex during Vocalization.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2020Article
- How does human motor cortex regulate vocal pitch in singers?Royal Society open science · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Vocal pitch is used as an important communicative device by humans, as found in the melodic dimension of both speech and song. Vocal pitch is determined by the degree of tension in the vocal folds of the larynx, which itself is influenced by complex and nonlinear interactions among the laryngeal muscles. The relationship between these muscles and vocal pitch has been described by a mathematical model in the form of a set of 'control rules'. We searched for the biological implementation of these control rules in the larynx motor cortex of the human brain. We scanned choral singers with functional magnetic resonance imaging as they produced discrete pitches at four different levels across their vocal range. While the locations of the larynx motor activations varied across singers, the activation peaks for the four pitch levels were highly consistent within each individual singer. This result was corroborated using multi-voxel pattern analysis, which demonstrated an absence of patterned activations differentiating any pairing of pitch levels. The complex and nonlinear relationships between the multiple laryngeal muscles that control vocal pitch may obscure the neural encoding of vocal pitch in the brain.
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