Alexandre Lehmann

McGill University | McGill · Department of Otolaryngology

Movement to a steady beat has been widely studied as a model of alignment of motor outputs on sensory inputs. However, how the encoding of sensory inputs is shaped during synchronized movements along the sensory pathway remains unknown. To investigate this, we simultaneously recorded brainstem and cortical electro-encephalographic activity while pa...

Sensitivity to temporal contingencies appears early in life and plays a key role in the ontogeny of socio-cognitive abilities in humans (Nadel et al., 1999; Gratier and Apter-Danon, 2009). The tendency for rhythmic coordination, sometimes referred to as “entrainment,” requires sensory-motor coupling (Phillips-Silver et al., 2010). In most of the fi...

The human auditory brainstem faithfully represents the acoustic structure of sounds (Galbraith et al., 1995). In musicians, presumably because music training and exposure places high demands on the auditory system, brainstem encoding of both speech and musical sounds is more robust than in non-musicians. It is believed that the corticofugal system,...

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic condition, characterized by a deficit in music perception and production, not explained by hearing loss, brain damage or lack of exposure to music. Despite inferior musical performance, amusics exhibit normal auditory cortical responses, with abnormal neural correlates suggested to lie beyond auditory cortices. H...

Music is integral to Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy (PAP), believed to enhance therapeutic outcomes by structuring experiences and facilitating emotional expression. However, the effects of conducting PAP without music are underexplored. This study examines the experiences of two breast cancer patients undergoing psilocybin therapy under Canada'...

Purpose For patients with single-sided deafness (SSD), choosing between bone conduction devices (BCDs) and contralateral routing of signal hearing aids (CROS) is challenging due to mixed evidence on their benefits. The lack of clear guidelines complicates clinical decision making. This study explores whether realistic spatial listening measures can...

For individuals with hearing loss, even successful speech communication comes at a cost. Cochlear implants transmit degraded information, specifically for voice pitch, which demands extra and sustained listening effort. The current study hypothesized that abnormal pitch patterns contribute to the additional listening effort, even in non-tonal langu...

Psilocybin, a psychoactive substance derived from fungi, has been utilized historically by diverse cultures for both medicinal and non-medicinal purposes, owing to its ability to elicit profound sensory and cognitive alterations and sustain long-term changes in mood and cognition. Promising results from recent clinical studies have generated a wave...

Purpose Greater recognition of the impact of hearing loss on cognitive functions has led speech/hearing clinics to focus more on auditory memory outcomes. Typically evaluated by scoring participants' recall on a list of unrelated words after they have heard the list read out loud, this method implies pitch and timing variations across words. Here,...

Humans achieve greater precision when synchronizing their movements with rhythmic sounds compared to visual events. This advantage is believed to arise from the superior temporal processing capabilities provided by the auditory system in combination with the coupling between auditory and motor systems [1]. However, the extent of this auditory advan...

Purpose Postoperative rehabilitation programs for cochlear implant (CI) recipients primarily emphasize enhancing speech perception. However, effective communication in everyday social interactions necessitates consideration of diverse verbal social cues to facilitate language comprehension. Failure to discern emotional expressions may lead to malad...

Background Although cochlear implants can restore auditory inputs to deafferented auditory cortices, the quality of the sound signal transmitted to the brain is severely degraded, limiting functional outcomes in terms of speech perception and emotion perception. The latter deficit negatively impacts cochlear implant users’ social integration and qu...

Rhythm is an omnipresent element of many daily activities. Numerous studies in cognitive sciences have highlighted that humans exhibit greater precision in synchronizing their movements with auditory rhythmic stimuli compared to visual ones. Deaf individuals were shown to excel in synchronizing with visual cues, surpassing those with normal hearing...

Single-sided deafness (SSD), characterized by the loss of hearing in one ear while the other ear retains normal hearing, poses significant challenges such as difficulties in speech-in-noise recognition, compromised sound localization, and reduced awareness of sounds in the affected auditory hemifield. Current therapeutic approaches aim to enhance s...

Background Subanesthetic ketamine has accumulated meta-analytic evidence for rapid antidepressant effects in treatment-resistant depression (TRD), resulting in both excitement and debate. Many unanswered questions surround ketamine’s mechanisms of action and its integration into real-world psychiatric care, resulting in diverse utilizations that va...

For individuals with hearing loss, even successful speech communication comes at a cost. Cochlear implants transmit degraded acoustic, specifically pitch, information, which demands extra and sustained listening effort. The current study hypothesized that abnormal pitch patterns contribute to the additional listening effort, even in non-tonal langu...

Auditory memory is an important everyday skill evaluated more and more frequently in clinical settings as there is recently a greater recognition of the cost of hearing loss to cognitive systems. Testing often involves reading a list of unrelated items aloud; but prosodic variations in pitch and timing across the list can affect the number of items...

Cochlear implants (CI) have had tremendous success restoring a sense of hearing in the deaf. However, even after months of intensive rehabilitation, many CI users struggle with appreciating emotive tones in speech and music despite good speech comprehension. Failure to perceive emotional expression can result in maladjusted social behaviour, leadin...

There is an increasing interest in the field of audiology and speech communication to measure the effort that it takes to listen in noisy environments, with obvious implications for populations suffering from hearing loss. Pupillometry offers one avenue to make progress in this enterprise but important methodological questions remain to be addresse...

Objective In daily life, failure to perceive emotional expressions can result in maladjusted behaviour. For cochlear implant users, perceiving emotional cues in sounds remains challenging, and the factors explaining the variability in patients' sensitivity to emotions are currently poorly understood. Understanding how these factors relate to audito...

Single-sided deafness (SSD) is characterized by the near or total loss of hearing in one ear with normal hearing in the contralateral ear and it gives rise to a functional listening handicap. By causing an acoustic head shadow in the auditory hemifield ipsilateral to the impaired ear, SSD impairs speech-in-noise recognition and sound localization,...

Cochlear implants (CI) are neural prostheses that can restore hearing in individuals with severe to profound hearing loss. Although CIs significantly improve quality of life, clinical outcomes are still highly variable. An important part of this variability is explained by the brain reorganization following cochlear implantation. Therefore, clinici...

Objective The aim of this study was to investigate brain reorganization following cochlear implantation using electroencephalography, an implant-compatible technique to record electrical brain activity. Methods We investigated cortical plasticity in cochlear implant (CI) users using visual evoked potentials in response to visual motion changes. We...

Professional disk jockeys (DJs) are an under-studied population whose performance involves creating new musical experiences by combining existing musical materials with a high level of temporal precision. In contemporary electronic dance music, these materials have a stable tempo and are composed with the expectation for further transformation duri...

Auditory steady-state evoked potentials (SS-EPs) are phase-locked neural responses to periodic stimuli, believed to reflect specific neural generators. As an objective measure, steady-state responses have been used in different clinical settings, including measuring hearing thresholds of normal and hearing-impaired subjects. Recent studies are in f...

Importance The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forth new challenges for health care workers, such as the daily use of personal protective equipment, including reusable facial respirators. Poor communication while wearing respirators may have fatal complications for patients, and no solution has been proposed to date. Objective To examine whether use...

SUMMARY Objective Using voice to speak or to sing is made possible by remarkably complex sensorimotor processes. Like any other sensorimotor system, the speech motor controller guides its actions with maximum performance at minimum cost, using available sources of information, among which, auditory feedback plays a major role. Manipulation of this...

Tinnitus and hyperacusis are two debilitating conditions that are highly comorbid. It has been postulated that they may originate from similar pathophysiological mechanisms such as an increase in central gain. Interestingly, sound stimulation has been shown to reduce central gain and is currently used for the treatment of both conditions. This stud...

Recent research has demonstrated that pupillometry is a robust measure for quantifying listening effort. However, pupillary responses in listening situations where multiple cognitive functions are engaged and sustained over a period of time remain hard to interpret. This limits our conceptualisation and understanding of listening effort in realisti...

Abstract Monitoring voice pitch is a fine-tuned process in daily conversations as conveying accurately the linguistic and affective cues in a given utterance depends on the precise control of phonation and intonation. This monitoring is thought to depend on whether the error is treated as self-generated or externally-generated, resulting in either...

Recent research has demonstrated that pupillometry is a robust measure for quantifying listening effort. However, pupillary responses in listening situations where multiple cognitive functions are engaged and sustained over a period of time remain hard to interpret. This limits our conceptualisation and understanding of listening effort in realisti...

From a baby's cry to a piece of music, we perceive emotion from our auditory environment every day. Many theories bring forward the concept of common neural substrates for the perception of vocal and musical emotions. It has been proposed that, for us to perceive emotions, music recruits emotional circuits that evolved for the processing of biologi...

Binaural beating is a perceptual auditory illusion occurring when presenting two neighboring frequencies to each ear separately. Several controversial claims have been attributed to binaural beats regarding their ability to entrain human brain activity and mood, in both the scientific literature and the marketing realm. Here, we sought to address t...

Binaural beating is a perceptual auditory illusion occurring when presenting two neighboring frequencies to each ear separately. Binaural beats have been attributed to several controversial claims regarding their ability to modulate brain activity and mood, in both the scientific literature and the marketing realm. Here, we sought to address those...

Background: Cochlear implant (CI) outcomes can be assessed using objective measures that reflect the integrity of the auditory pathway. One such measure is the middle latency response (MLR), which can provide valuable information for clinicians. Purpose: Traditional stimuli for evoking MLRs, that is, clicks or tone bursts, do not stimulate all p...

Objective: Cochlear implants (CIs) restore a sense of hearing in deaf individuals. However, they do not transmit the acoustic signal with sufficient fidelity, leading to difficulties in recognizing emotions in voice and in music. The study aimed to explore the neurophysiological bases of these limitations. Design: Twenty-two adults (18 to 70 yea...

Cochlear implants can successfully restore hearing in profoundly deaf individuals and enable speech comprehension. However, the acoustic signal provided is severely degraded and, as a result, many important acoustic cues for perceiving emotion in voices and music are unavailable. The deficit of cochlear implant users in auditory emotion processing...

Experience of the world is inherently multisensory. It has been suggested that audiovisual modulation occurs as early as subcortical auditory stages. However, this was based on the frequency-following response, a measure recently found to be significantly generated from cortical sources. It therefore remains unclear whether subcortical auditory pro...

Background Toning is a form of vocalizing that utilizes the natural voice to express sounds ranging from cries, grunts, and groans to open vowel sounds and humming on the full exhalation of the breath. Music therapists are increasingly utilizing toning in their clinical practice for a variety of therapeutic aims. Yet the effects of toning are not w...

Cochlear implants restore hearing in deaf individuals, but speech perception remains challenging. Poor discrimination of spectral components is thought to account for limitations of speech recognition in cochlear implant users. We investigated how combined variations of spectral components along two orthogonal dimensions can maximize neural discrim...

The spontaneous ability to entrain to meter periodicities is central to music perception and production across cultures. There is increasing evidence that this ability involves selective neural responses to meter-related frequencies. This phenomenon has been observed in the human auditory cortex, yet it could be the product of evolutionarily older...

We evaluated the effect of different forms of singing on cardiorespiratory physiology, and we aimed at disentangling the role of breathing from that of vocal production. Cardiorespiratory recordings were obtained from 20 healthy adults at rest and during: a) singing of familiar slow songs as in the standard form of Western culture; b) improvised vo...

The extraction and encoding of acoustical temporal regularities are fundamental for human cognitive auditory abilities such as speech or beat entrainment. Because the comparison of the neural sensitivity to temporal regularities between human and animals is fundamental to relate non-invasive measures of auditory processing to their neuronal basis,...

The aim of the present study was to assess inhibition of pain and somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEP) by heterotopic noxious counter-stimulation (HNCS) and by selective attention in patients with chronic non-specific LBP. Seventeen patients and age/sex matched controls were recruited (10 men, 7 women; mean age ± SD: 43.3 ± 10.4 and 42.7 ± 11.1, r...

Cochlear implants (CIs) partially restore the sense of hearing in the deaf. However, the ability to recognize emotions in speech and music is reduced due to the implant’s electrical signal limitations and the patient’s altered neural pathways. Electrophysiological correlations of these limitations are not yet well established. Here we aimed to char...

Objective To systematically review and quantify current evidence regarding the association of GJB2 mutation status with outcomes of pediatric cochlear implantation. Data Sources PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library were searched for “GJB2,”“pediatric hearing loss,” and “cochlear implantation” and their synonyms, with no language restrictions,...

Neurons in the auditory cortex synchronize their responses to temporal regularities in sound input. This coupling or "entrainment" is thought to facilitate beat extraction and rhythm perception in temporally structured sounds, such as music. As a consequence of such entrainment, the auditory cortex responds to an omitted (silent) sound in a regular...

Objectives: To compare the hearing outcomes of stapedotomy vs cochlear implantation in patients with advanced otosclerosis. Data sources: PubMed, EMBASE, and The Cochrane Library were searched for the terms otosclerosis, stapedotomy, and cochlear implantation and their synonyms with no language restrictions up to March 10, 2015. Methods: Studi...

Heterotopic noxious counter-stimulation (HNCS) inhibits pain and pain processes through cerebral and cerebrospinal mechanisms. However, it is unclear whether HNCS inhibits non-nociceptive processes, which needs to be clarified for a better understanding of HNCS analgesia. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of HNCS on perception and sc...

The scalp-recorded frequency-following response (FFR) is a measure of the auditory nervous system's representation of periodic sound, and may serve as a marker of training-related enhancements, behavioural deficits, and clinical conditions. However, FFRs of healthy normal subjects show considerable variability that remains unexplained. We investiga...

The Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ) questionnaire investigates the main facets of music experience that could explain the variance observed in how people experience reward associated with music. Currently, only English and Spanish versions of this questionnaire are available. The objective of this study is to validate a French version o...

Source items and French translation

Raw Data

International French translation of the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire

Aim. Movement to a steady beat has been widely studied as a model of alignment of motor outputs on sensory inputs. However, how the encoding of sensory inputs is shaped during synchronized movements along the sensory pathway remains unknown. Methods. To investigate this, we simultaneously recorded brainstem and cortical electro-encephalographic act...

Some combinations of musical tones sound pleasing to Western listeners, and are termed consonant, while others sound discordant, and are termed dissonant. The perceptual phenomenon of consonance has been traced to the acoustic property of harmonicity. It has been repeatedly shown that neural correlates of consonance can be found as early as the aud...

The mammalian nervous system can adapt to the challenges of life through neural plasticity. The brain will undergo extensive reorganization following sensory deprivation or damage to afferent pathways (Kaas, 2001). This plastic reorganization develops as a function of time. A recent review on plasticity in the blind (Lazzouni and Lepore, 2014) stre...

groove, dance, timing

Music and voice bear many similarities and share neural resources to some extent. Experience dependent plasticity provides a window into the neural overlap between these two domains. Here, we suggest that research on auditory deprived individuals whose hearing has been bionically restored offers a unique insight into the functional and structural o...

Objectives: To validate a French version of the Barcelona Music Research Questionnaire (BMRQ). This questionnaire investigates the main facets of music experience that could explain the variance observed in how people experience reward associated with music. Currently, only English and Spanish versions of this questionnaire are available. Methods:...

Selective attention is the mechanism that allows focusing one's attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, for instance, on a single conversation in a noisy room. Attending to one sound source rather than another changes activity in the human auditory cortex, but it is unclear whether attention to different aco...

The voluntary control of respiration is used as a common means to regulate pain and emotions and is fundamental to various relaxation and meditation techniques. The aim of the present study was to examine how breathing frequency and phase affect pain perception, spinal nociceptive activity (RIII-reflex) and brain activity (scalp somatosensory evoke...

Mental rotation is the capacity to predict the orientation of an object or the layout of a scene after a change in viewpoint. Previous studies have shown that the cognitive cost of mental rotations is reduced when viewpoint change results from the observer's motion rather than the object or spatial layout's rotation. The classical interpretation fo...

Mental rotation is the capacity to predict the outcome of spatial relationships after a change in viewpoint. These changes arise either from the rotation of the test object array or from the rotation of the observer. Previous studies showed that the cognitive cost of mental rotations is reduced when viewpoint changes result from the observer's moti...

Mental rotation is the capacity to predict the orientation of an object or the layout of a scene after a change in viewpoint. Previous studies have shown that the cognitive cost of mental rotations is reduced when the viewpoint change results from the observer's motion rather than the object or spatial layout's rotation. The classical interpretatio...

Mental rotation is the capacity to predict the outcome of spatial relationships after a change in viewpoint, which arises arise either from the test array rotation or the observer rotation. Several studies have reported that the cognitive cost of a mental rotation is reduced when the change in viewpoint result from the observer’s motion, which ca...

Real world perception rarely involves separate sensory modalities. When remembering one's way in an unknown city we make a simultaneous use of several cognitive strategies. One of them is to remember chosen encountered landmarks and associate them with egocentric actions (such as ''turn right at the fountain''). Navigation studies in humans have ra...