A growing body of research suggests that intrinsic neuronal slow (< 10 Hz) oscillations in auditory cortex appear to track incoming speech and other spectro-temporally complex auditory signals. Within this framework, several recent studies have identified critical-band temporal envelopes as the specific acoustic feature being reflected by the phase of these oscillations. However, how this alignment between speech acoustics and neural oscillations might underpin intelligibility is unclear. Here we test the hypothesis that the ‘sharpness’ of temporal fluctuations in the critical band envelope acts as a temporal cue to speech syllabic rate, driving delta-theta rhythms to track the stimulus and facilitate intelligibility. We interpret our findings as evidence that sharp events in the stimulus cause cortical rhythms to re-align and parse the stimulus into syllable-sized chunks for further decoding. Using magnetoencephalographic recordings, we show that by removing temporal fluctuations that occur at the syllabic rate, envelope-tracking activity is reduced. By artificially reinstating these temporal fluctuations, envelope-tracking activity is regained. These changes in tracking correlate with intelligibility of the stimulus. Together, the results suggest that the sharpness of fluctuations in the stimulus, as reflected in the cochlear output, drive oscillatory activity to track and entrain to the stimulus, at its syllabic rate. This process likely facilitates parsing of the stimulus into meaningful chunks appropriate for subsequent decoding, enhancing perception and intelligibility.

The ability to generate temporal predictions is fundamental for adaptive behavior. Precise timing at the time-scale of seconds is critical, for instance to predict trajectories or to select relevant information. What mechanisms form the basis for such accurate timing? Recent evidence suggests that (1) temporal predictions adjust sensory selection by controlling neural oscillations in time and (2) the motor system plays an active role in inferring "when" events will happen. We hypothesized that oscillations in the delta and beta bands are instrumental in predicting the occurrence of auditory targets. Participants listened to brief rhythmic tone sequences and detected target delays while undergoing magnetoencephalography recording. Prior to target occurrence, we found that coupled delta (1-3 Hz) and beta (18-22 Hz) oscillations temporally align with upcoming targets and bias decisions towards correct responses, suggesting that delta-beta coupled oscillations underpin prediction accuracy. Subsequent to target occurrence, subjects update their decisions using the magnitude of the alpha-band (10-14 Hz) response as internal evidence of target timing. These data support a model in which the orchestration of oscillatory dynamics between sensory and motor systems is exploited to accurately select sensory information in time.

Recent studies establish that cortical oscillations track naturalistic speech in a remarkably faithful way. Here, we test whether such neural activity, particularly low-frequency (<8 Hz; delta-theta) oscillations, similarly entrain to music and whether experience modifies such a cortical phenomenon. Music of varying tempi was used to test entrainment at different rates. In three magnetoencephalography experiments, we recorded from nonmusicians, as well as musicians with varying years of experience. Recordings from nonmusicians demonstrate cortical entrainment that tracks musical stimuli over a typical range of tempi, but not at tempi below 1 note per second. Importantly, the observed entrainment correlates with performance on a concurrent pitch-related behavioral task. In contrast, the data from musicians show that entrainment is enhanced by years of musical training, at all presented tempi. This suggests a bidirectional relationship between behavior and cortical entrainment, a phenomenon that has not previously been reported. Additional analyses focus on responses in the beta range (∼15-30 Hz)-often linked to delta activity in the context of temporal predictions. Our findings provide evidence that the role of beta in temporal predictions scales to the complex hierarchical rhythms in natural music and enhances processing of musical content. This study builds on important findings on brainstem plasticity and represents a compelling demonstration that cortical neural entrainment is tightly coupled to both musical training and task performance, further supporting a role for cortical oscillatory activity in music perception and cognition.ortical oscillations in specific frequency ranges are implicated in many aspects of auditory perception. Principal among these links are "delta-theta phase entrainment" to sounds, hypothesized to parse signals into chunks (<8 Hz) (1-6), "alpha suppression," correlated with intelligible speech (∼10 Hz) (7,8), and "beta oscillatory modulation," argued to reflect the prediction of rhythmic inputs (∼20 Hz) (9-13).In particular, delta-theta tracking is driven by both stimulus acoustics and speech intelligibility (14, 15). Such putative cortical entrainment is, however, not limited to speech but is elicited by stimuli such as FM narrowband noise (16, 17) or click trains (18). Overall, the data suggest that, although cortical entrainment is necessary to support intelligibility of continuous speech-perhaps by parsing the input stream into chunks for subsequent decodingthe reverse does not hold: "intelligibility" is not required to drive entrainment. The larger question of the function of entrainment in general auditory processing remains unsettled. Therefore, we investigate here whether this mechanism extends to a different, salient, ecological stimulus: music.In addition, higher-frequency activity merits scrutiny. Rhythmic stimuli evince beta band activity (15-30 Hz) (10, 19), associated with synchronization across sensorimotor cortical networks (20, 21). Beta power is modulated at the rat...

A body of research demonstrates convincingly a role for synchronization of auditory cortex to rhythmic structure in sounds including speech and music. Some studies hypothesize that an oscillator in auditory cortex could underlie important temporal processes such as segmentation and prediction. An important critique of these findings raises the plausible concern that what is measured is perhaps not an oscillator but is instead a sequence of evoked responses. The two distinct mechanisms could look very similar in the case of rhythmic input, but an oscillator might better provide the computational roles mentioned above (i.e., segmentation and prediction). We advance an approach to adjudicate between the two models: analyzing the phase lag between stimulus and neural signal across different stimulation rates. We ran numerical simulations of evoked and oscillatory computational models, showing that in the evoked case,phase lag is heavily rate-dependent, while the oscillatory model displays marked phase concentration across stimulation rates. Next, we compared these model predictions with magnetoencephalography data recorded while participants listened to music of varying note rates. Our results show that the phase concentration of the experimental data is more in line with the oscillatory model than with the evoked model. This finding supports an auditory cortical signal that (i) contains components of both bottom-up evoked responses and internal oscillatory synchronization whose strengths are weighted by their appropriateness for particular stimulus types and (ii) cannot be explained by evoked responses alone.

Parsing continuous acoustic streams into perceptual units is fundamental to auditory perception. Previous studies have uncovered a cortical entrainment mechanism in the delta and theta bands (~1-8 Hz) that correlates with formation of perceptual units in speech, music, and other quasi-rhythmic stimuli. Whether cortical oscillations in the delta-theta bands are passively entrained by regular acoustic patterns or play an active role in parsing the acoustic stream is debated. Here, we investigate cortical oscillations using novel stimuli with 1/f modulation spectra. These 1/f signals have no rhythmic structure but contain information over many timescales because of their broadband modulation characteristics. We chose 1/f modulation spectra with varying exponents of f, which simulate the dynamics of environmental noise, speech, vocalizations, and music. While undergoing magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording, participants listened to 1/f stimuli and detected embedded target tones. Tone detection performance varied across stimuli of different exponents and can be explained by local signal-to-noise ratio computed using a temporal window around 200 ms. Furthermore, theta band oscillations, surprisingly, were observed for all stimuli, but robust phase coherence was preferentially displayed by stimuli with exponents 1 and 1.5. We constructed an auditory processing model to quantify acoustic information on various timescales and correlated the model outputs with the neural results. We show that cortical oscillations reflect a chunking of segments, > 200 ms. These results suggest an active auditory segmentation mechanism, complementary to entrainment, operating on a timescale of ~200 ms to organize acoustic information.