Name:Oscar Bedford

School/Affiliation:McGill University

Co-Authors:Alberto Ara, Jeremie Ginzburg, Philippe Albouy, Robert Zatorre, Virginia Penhune

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Abstract:

Auditory-motor coupling is a bidirectional brain system that supports speech and music. Prior literature has shown the presence of motor activity during passive listening to known melodies, and our lab recently demonstrated with TMS that this activity is anticipatory, occurs in non-musicians, and can be elicited at the single note level after a single motor training session. However, the associated oscillatory dynamics remain unclear. Other EEG studies have linked suppressed activity in the mu band (9-13Hz) to this phenomenon in musicians, but never in non-musicians, nor at the single note level. To this end, we recruited 24 non-musicians who underwent motor training of a simple melody, which was both preceded and followed by passive listening to the trained melody and other melodies. Continous EEG recordings allowed us to develop a functional localizer using data from the motor training part, which we used to identify channels, frequencies, and timepoints that would potentially showcase mu suppression during passive listening to the trained melody. After masking the data, we obtained significant mu suppression immediately preceding each tone during passive listening to the trained melody after motor training, compared to other passive conditions. We found no significant effects in other timewindows or frequency bands, including the beta band. These findings prove that mu suppression is independent of musical training and can be captured at the individual note level. Moreover, our findings align with theories of auditory-motor integration that posit that motor activity is predictive for learned auditory-motor sequences heard in passive listening contexts.