Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Music is ubiquitous across cultures, and humans engage in social interactions through music from early in life. A cornerstone of these interactions is rhythm categorisation, allowing the sheer diversity of rhythmic inputs to be mapped onto internal rhythm categories. The pervasiveness of certain rhythm categories across cultures suggests that rhythm categorisation may be partially rooted in neurobiological predispositions constraining the internal representations of rhythm. However, this view appears to conflict with the diversity of music practices across cultures, which points to a role of experience in rhythm categorisation. To assess the relative contributions of neurobiological predispositions and experience, we tested 0- to 3-day-old newborns, capitalising on their minimal postnatal experience with music. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we recorded, in newborns and adults, brain responses to drum sounds whose pattern of relative interval duration ranged from isochronous to long-short rhythms (1:1 – 2:1 interval ratio). Results indicate significant categorisation in newborns’ neural responses, with a representational structure that correlate with those of adults, yet with a greater degree of differentiation across rhythms. These findings reveal neurobiological predispositions enabling rhythm categorisation to be present at birth and further shaped across the lifespan, highlighting the evolutionary roots and plasticity supporting this human cultural practice.
Institutions: UCLouvain, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Inserm, Groupe de Recherches sur l’Analyse Multimodale de la Fonction Cérébrale, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Cornell University, University of Oslo, Western Sydney University, International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222906267