Edward Large

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Connecticut

A great deal of research in the neuroscience of music suggests that neural oscillations synchronize with musical stimuli. Although neural synchronization is a well-studied mechanism underpinning expectation, it has even more far-reaching implications for music. In this Perspective, we survey the literature on the neuroscience of music, including pi...

Why do humans spontaneously dance to music? To test the hypothesis that motor dynamics reflect predictive timing during music listening, we created melodies with varying degrees of rhythmic predictability (syncopation) and asked participants to rate their wanting-to-move (groove) experience. Degree of syncopation and groove ratings are quadraticall...

Computational models are used to predict the performance of human listeners for carefully specified signal and noise conditions. However, there may be substantial discrepancies between the conditions under which listeners are tested and those used for model predictions. Thus, models may predict better performance than exhibited by the listeners, or...

A musician’s spontaneous rate of movement, called spontaneous motor tempo (SMT), can be measured while spontaneously playing a simple melody. Data shows that the SMT influences the musician’s tempo and synchronization. In this study we present a model that captures these phenomena. We review the results from three previously-published studies: solo...

Rhythmicity permeates large parts of human experience. Humans generate various motor and brain rhythms spanning a range of frequencies. We also experience and synchronize to externally imposed rhythmicity, for example from music and song or from the 24-h light-dark cycles of the sun. In the context of music, humans have the ability to perceive, gen...

Why do humans spontaneously dance to music? To test the hypothesis that motor dynamics reflect predictive timing during music listening, we built melodies with varying degrees of rhythmic predictability. Magnetoencephalography data showed that while auditory regions track the rhythm of melodies, intrinsic neural dynamics at delta (1.4 Hz) and beta...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by disrupted, synchronous neural activity in the gamma‐band range (30‐100 Hz) and atypical cross‐frequency coupling between gamma and other bands of brain activity1‐3. In non‐human‐animal models, restoring aberrant gamma activity with non‐invasive gamma sensory stimulation remediates multiple pathophysiolog...

Neural entrainment to musical rhythm is thought to underlie the perception and production of music. In aging populations, the strength of neural entrainment to rhythm has been found to be attenuated, particularly during attentive listening to auditory streams. However, previous studies on neural entrainment to rhythm and aging have often employed a...

Neural entrainment to musical rhythm is thought to underlie the perception and production of music. In aging populations, the strength of neural entrainment to rhythm has been found to be attenuated, particularly during attentive listening to auditory streams. However, previous studies on neural entrainment to rhythm and aging have often employed a...

Humans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Human social interaction has largely been addressed in dyadic paradigms and it is yet to be determined whether the ensuing conclusions generalize to larger groups. Studied m...

A consistent relationship has been found between rhythmic processing and reading skills. Impairment of the ability to entrain movements to an auditory rhythm in clinical populations with language-related deficits, such as children with developmental dyslexia, has been found in both behavioral and neural studies. In this study, we explored the relat...

Musical rhythm abilities—the perception of and coordinated action to the rhythmic structure of music—undergo remarkable change over human development. In the current paper, we introduce a theoretical framework for modeling the development of musical rhythm. The framework, based on Neural Resonance Theory (NRT), explains rhythm development in terms...

Humans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Social interaction has largely been studied in dyadic contexts. The presence of multiple agents engaged in the same task space creates different constraints and possibilitie...

High linearity/sensitivity and a wide dynamic sensing range are the most desirable features for pressure sensors to accurately detect and respond to external pressure stimuli. Even though a number of recent studies have demonstrated a low-cost pressure sensing device for a smart insole system by using scalable and deformable conductive materials, t...

Previous work suggests that auditory–vestibular interactions, which emerge during bodily movement to music, can influence the perception of musical rhythm. In a seminal study on the ontogeny of musical rhythm, Phillips‐Silver and Trainor (2005) found that bouncing infants to an unaccented rhythm influenced infants’ perceptual preferences for accent...

We study multifrequency Hebbian plasticity by analyzing phenomenological models of weakly connected neural networks. We start with an analysis of a model for single-frequency networks previously shown to learn and memorize phase differences between component oscillators. We then study a model for gradient frequency neural networks (GrFNNs) which ex...

In recent years, music‐based interventions (MBIs) have risen in popularity as a non‐invasive, sustainable form of care for treating dementia‐related disorders, such as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Despite their clinical potential, evidence regarding the efficacy of MBIs on patient outcomes is mixed. Recently, a line...

A musician’s spontaneous rate of movement, called spontaneous motor tempo (SMT), can be measured while spontaneously playing a simple melody. Data shows that the SMT influences the musician’s tempo and synchronization. In this study we present a model that captures these phenomena. We review the results from three previously-published studies: (1)...

In recent years, music-based interventions (MBIs) have risen in popularity as a non-invasive, sustainable form of care for treating dementia-related disorders, such as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Despite their clinical potential, evidence regarding the efficacy of MBIs on patient outcomes is mixed. Recently, a line...

Solving phase equations for systems with high degrees of nonlinearities is cumbersome. However, in the case of two coupled canonical oscillators, that is, a reduced model of translated Wilson–Cowan neuronal dynamics, under slowly varying amplitude and rotating wave approximations, we suggested a convenient way to find their average relative phase e...

Previous work suggests that auditory-vestibular interactions, which emerge during bodily movement to music, can influence the perception of musical rhythm. In a seminal study on the ontogeny of musical rhythm, Phillips-Silver & Trainor (2005) found that bouncing infants to an unaccented rhythm influenced infants' perceptual preferences for accented...

Dancing and playing music require people to coordinate actions with auditory rhythms. In laboratory perception-action coordination tasks, people are asked to synchronize taps with a metronome. When synchronizing with a metronome, people tend to anticipate stimulus onsets, tapping slightly before the stimulus. The anticipation tendency increases wit...

Nonlinear responses to acoustic signals arise through active processes in the cochlea, which has an exquisite sensitivity and wide dynamic range that can be explained by critical nonlinear oscillations of outer hair cells. Here we ask how the interaction of critical nonlinearities with the basilar membrane and other organ of Corti components could...

Previous research suggests that infants’ perception of musical rhythm is fine‐tuned to culture‐specific rhythmic structures over the first postnatal year of human life. To date, however, little is known about the neurobiological principles that may underlie this process. In the current study, we used a dynamical systems model featuring neural oscil...

We study mode locking in a canonical model of gradient frequency neural networks under periodic forcing. The canonical model is a generic mathematical model for a network of nonlinear oscillators tuned to a range of distinct frequencies. It is mathematically more tractable than biological neuron models and allows close analysis of mode-locking beha...

Neural activity phase-locks to rhythm in both music and speech. However, the literature currently lacks a direct test of whether cortical tracking of comparable rhythmic structure is comparable across domains. Moreover, although musical training improves multiple aspects of music and speech perception, the relationship between musical training and...

Pulse is the perceptual phenomenon in which an individual perceives a steady beat underlying a complex auditory rhythm, as in music. The neural mechanism by which pulse is computed from a complex rhythm is a topic of current debate. Neural Resonance Theory (NRT) predicts that synchronization itself is the neural mechanism of pulse perception and is...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Prior expectations can bias evaluative judgments of sensory information. We show that information about a performer's status can bias the evaluation of musical stimuli, reflected by differential activity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Moreover, we demonstrate that decreased susceptibility to this confirmation bias is (a) accompanied...

THE IMPORTANCE OF HARMONY PERCEPTION IN understanding tonal melodies has been extensively studied, but underlying processes of implied harmonic perception remain unexplored. This study explores how listeners perceive implied harmony in real-time while hearing tonal melodies by addressing two questions: How is each tone of a tonal melody harmonicall...

Many neurons in the auditory system of the brain must encode periodic signals. These neurons under periodic stimulation display rich dynamical states including mode locking and chaotic responses. Periodic stimuli such as sinusoidal waves and amplitude modulated sounds can lead to various forms of n : m mode-locked states, in which a neuron fires n...

Most humans have a near-automatic inclination to tap, clap, or move to the beat of music. The capacity to extract a periodic beat from a complex musical segment is remarkable, as it requires abstraction from the temporal structure of the stimulus. It has been suggested that nonlinear interactions in neural networks result in cortical oscillations a...

Hoglund (et al., 2010) reported the ability of listeners to detect a recorded signal masked by nine different ambient sounds. Signals were selected from 410 recordings of two different helicopters; maskers were selected from nine outdoor field recordings from three different locations. Signal and masker levels were randomized from trial to trial in...

Human capacity for entraining movement to external rhythms—i.e., beat keeping—is ubiquitous, but its evolutionary history and neural underpinnings remain a mystery. Recent findings of entrainment to simple and complex rhythms in non-human animals pave the way for a novel comparative approach to assess the origins and mechanisms of rhythmic behavior...

SCIENCE SINCE ANTIQUITY HAS ASKED WHETHER mathematical relationships among acoustic frequencies govern musical relationships. Psychophysics rejected frequency ratio theories, focusing on sensory phenomena predicted by linear analysis of sound. Cognitive psychologists have since focused on long-term exposure to the music of one's culture and short-t...

SCIENCE SINCE ANTIQUITY HAS ASKED WHETHER mathematical relationships among acoustic frequencies govern musical relationships. Psychophysics rejected frequency ratio theories, focusing on sensory phenomena predicted by linear analysis of sound. Cognitive psychologists have since focused on long-term exposure to the music of one's culture and short-t...

Oscillatory instability at the Hopf bifurcation is a dynamical phenomenon that has been suggested to characterize active non-linear processes observed in the auditory system. Networks of oscillators poised near Hopf bifurcation points and tuned to tonotopically distributed frequencies have been used as models of auditory processing at various level...

Many neurons in the auditory system of the brain must encode amplitude variations of a periodic signal. These neurons under periodic stimulation display rich dynami-cal states including mode-locking and chaotic responses [1]. Periodic stimuli such as sinusoidal waves and amplitude modulated (AM) sounds can lead to various forms of n:m mode-locked s...

Entrainment of cortical rhythms to acoustic rhythms has been hypothesized to be the neural correlate of pulse and meter perception in music. Dynamic attending theory first proposed synchronization of endogenous perceptual rhythms nearly 40 years ago, but only recently has the pivotal role of neural synchrony been demonstrated. Significant progress...

The emergence of speech and music in the human species represent major evolutionary transitions that enabled the use of complex, temporally structured acoustic signals to coordinate social interaction. While the fundamental capacity for temporal coordination with complex acoustic signals has been shown in a few distantly related species, the extent...

Many neurons in the auditory system of the brain must encode amplitude variations of a periodic signal. These neurons under periodic stimulation display rich dynamical states including mode-locking and chaotic responses. Periodic stimuli such as sinusoidal waves and amplitude modulated (AM) sounds can lead to various forms of n:m mode-locked states...

A method for learning connections between nonlinear oscillators in a neural network comprising the steps of providing a plurality of nonlinear oscillators, with each respective oscillator producing an oscillation distinct from the others in response to an input and detecting an input at an at least first oscillator of the plurality of nonlinear osc...

1/f serial correlations and statistical self-similarity (fractal structure) have been measured in various dimensions of musical compositions. Musical performances also display 1/f properties in expressive tempo fluctuations, and listeners predict tempo changes when synchronizing. Here the authors show that the 1/f structure is sufficient for listen...

Data show that amplitude modulation is an important factor in the neural representation and perceived pitch of sound. However, sounds with identical Hilbert envelopes can elicit different pitches. Sounds with consecutive harmonics elicit a pitch at the difference frequency of the harmonics. If this complex is shifted up or down, the amplitude envel...

Is there something special about the way music communicates feelings? Theorists since Meyer (1956) have attempted to explain how music could stimulate varied and subtle affective experiences by violating learned expectancies, or by mimicking other forms of social interaction. Our proposal is that music speaks to the brain in its own language; it ne...

From an early age onwards we tend to synchronize to temporally regular and rhythmic stimuli, such as the beat in music, which inevitably leads to movement. Recently, such basic mapping of temporally regular sound and motor behavior has been critically discussed and the four speakers of this symposium will address extensions of a basic sensorimotor...

We conducted a preferred tempo experiment with bonobo apes (Pan paniscus). In this study a human experimenter performed a series of metronome matched tempi ranging from 160 to 280 bpm. Our results suggest that this bonobo prefers faster tempi (approximately 230 bpm), plays slower in response to slower tempi, and is capable of matching stimulus temp...

A method for mimicking the auditory system's response to rhythm of an input signal having a time varying structure comprising the steps of receiving a time varying input signal x(t) to a network of n nonlinear oscillators, each oscillator having a different natural frequency of oscillation and obeying a dynamical equation of the form r . = r ⁡...

Studies over several decades have identified many of the neuronal substrates of music perception by pursuing pitch and rhythm perception separately. Here, we address the question of how these mechanisms interact, starting with the observation that the peripheral pathways of the so-called "Core" and "Matrix" thalamocortical system provide the anatom...

Studies of pulse perception in rhythms often ask what periodicity describes the pulse, e.g., tempo identification. In studies of pulse attribution, irregular rhythmic sequences are rated for the degree to which a pulse percept is elicited, if at all. Here, we investigate how a resonance approach to pulse perception may explain the reduction in puls...

Tonal relationships are foundational in music, providing the basis upon which musical structures, such as melodies, are constructed and perceived. A recent dynamic theory of musical tonality predicts that networks of auditory neurons resonate nonlinearly to musical stimuli. Nonlinear resonance leads to stability and attraction relationships among n...

Moving in synchrony with an auditory rhythm requires predictive action based on neurodynamic representation of temporal information. Although it is known that a regular auditory rhythm can facilitate rhythmic movement, the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain poorly understood. In this experiment using human magnetoencephalography, 1...

Song composers incorporate linguistic prosody into their music when setting words to melody, a process called “textsetting.” Composers tend to align the expected stress of the lyrics with strong metrical positions in the music. The present study was designed to explore the idea that temporal alignment helps listeners to better understand song lyric...

A new theory of musical tonality is explored, which treats the central auditory pathway as a complex nonlinear dynamical system. The theory predicts that as networks of neural oscillators phase-lock to musical stimuli, stability and attraction relationships will develop among frequencies, and these dynamic forces correspond to perceptions of stabil...

People often coordinate their actions with sequences that exhibit temporal variability and unfold at multiple periodicities. We compared oscillator- and timekeeper-based accounts of temporal coordination by examining musicians' coordination of rhythmic musical sequences with a metronome that gradually changed rate at the end of a musical phrase (Ex...

Pulse and meter are remarkable in part because these perceived periodicities can arise from rhythmic stimuli that are not periodic. This phenomenon is most striking in syncopated rhythms, found in many genres of music, including music of non-Western cultures. In general, syncopated rhythms may have energy at frequencies that do not correspond to pe...

The aim of this study was to explore the role of attention in pulse and meter perception using complex rhythms. We used a selective attention paradigm in which participants attended to either a complex auditory rhythm or a visually presented word list. Performance on a reproduction task was used to gauge whether participants were attending to the a...

The Chopin expressive performance contains tempo and loudness variations as performed by an expert pianist. (3.46 MB MP3)

The Chopin mechanical performance maintains constant tempo and sound intensity throughout the piece (equal to the mean tempo and sound intensity of the expressive performance). (3.46 MB MP3)

Animation of the real-time changes in neural activity that were time-locked to the tempo fluctuations in a musical performance of Frédéric Chopin's Etude in E major, Op.10, No. 3. This animation includes a subset of the brain regions that exhibited time-locked activity. Shown are cortical and subcortical motor areas thought to be involved in pulse...

Apart from its natural relevance to cognition, music provides a window into the intimate relationships between production, perception, experience, and emotion. Here, emotional responses and neural activity were observed as they evolved together with stimulus parameters over several minutes. Participants listened to a skilled music performance that...

Music is a form of communication that relies on highly structured temporal sequences comparable in complexity to language. Music is found among all human cultures, and musical languages vary across cultures with learning. Tonality – a set of stability and attraction relationships perceived among musical frequencies – is a universal feature of music...

We derive a canonical model for gradient frequency neural networks (GFNNs) capable of processing time-varying external stimuli. First, we employ normal form theory to derive a fully expanded model of neural oscillation. Next, we generalize from the single oscillator model to heterogeneous frequency networks with an external input. Finally, we defin...

The experience of musical rhythm is a remarkable psychophysical phenomenon, in part because the perception of periodicities, namely pulse and meter, arise from stimuli that are not periodic. One possible function of such a transformation is to enable synchronization between individuals through perception of a common abstract temporal structure (e.g...

We examined beta- (approximately 20 Hz) and gamma- (approximately 40 Hz) band activity in auditory cortices by means of magnetoencephalography (MEG) during passive listening to a regular musical beat with occasional omission of single tones. The beta activity decreased after each tone, followed by an increase, thus forming a periodic modulation syn...

WE INVESTIGATED PEOPLES’ ABILITY TO ADAPT TO THE fluctuating tempi of music performance. In Experiment 1, four pieces from different musical styles were chosen, and performances were recorded from a skilled pianist who was instructed to play with natural expression. Spectral and rescaled range analyses on interbeat interval time-series revealed lon...

Musicians vary performance parameters, such as tempo and sound intensity, to express emotion dynamically. Our goals were to link specific parameters of performance expression with listeners' emotional responses and neural activity. Ten musically trained and ten untrained participants listened to two versions of a romantic piano composition. The exp...

Oscillatory cortical activities in beta-band (13-20 Hz) are related to a somatomotor system, and gamma-bands (20 Hz) are involved with feature binding in perception. Previously gamma-band activity in electroencephalography was found to modulate with musical pulse with a two-beat metric accent. The present study examined beta- and gamma-band activit...

A growing body of evidence is consistent with the possibility of nonlinear oscillation in both the peripheral and central auditory nervous systems. This talk will introduce a model of nonlinear time-frequency transformation via an array of neural oscillators, each tuned to a distinct frequency, organized along a frequency gradient. Transformation o...

The goal of this study was to understand the ability of musicians and nonmusicians to entrain to musical performances with naturally fluctuating tempo. In experiment 1, we investigated the nature of tempo fluctuations produced by a musician. We collected four music performances from a skilled pianist who was instructed to play with natural expressi...

THE GOAL OF THIS STUDY was to assess the ability of North American adults to synchronize and continue their tapping to complex meter patterns in the presence and absence of musical cues to meter. We asked participants to tap to drum patterns structured according to two different 7/8 meters common in Balkan music. Each meter contained three nonisoch...

This paper proposes a novel model for central auditory processing, a network of nonlinear oscillators. The properties of such networks are common to a family of physiological models that includes active cochlear models and oscillatory neural networks. Auditory perception can be modeled based on the generic properties of such physiological mechanism...

We outline a theory of tonality that predicts tonal stability, attraction, and categorization based on the principles of nonlinear resonance. Perception of tonality is the natural consequence of neural resonance, arising from central auditory nonlinearities.

Temporal expectancy is thought to play a fundamental role in the perception of rhythm. This review summarizes recent studies that investigated rhythmic expectancy by recording neuroelectric activity with high temporal resolution during the presentation of rhythmic patterns. Prior event-related brain potential (ERP) studies have uncovered auditory e...

We aim to capture the perceptual dynamics of auditory streaming using a neurally inspired model of auditory processing. Traditional approaches view streaming as a competition of streams, realized within a tonotopically organized neural network. In contrast, we view streaming to be a dynamic integration process which resides at locations other than...

Relatively little is known about the dynamics of auditory cortical rhythm processing using non-invasive methods, partly because resolving responses to events in patterns is difficult using long-latency auditory neuroelectric responses. We studied the relationship between short-latency gamma-band (20-60 Hz) activity (GBA) and the structure of rhythm...

We measured modulations of neuroelectric gamma-band activity (GBA) as subjects listened to isochronous pure-tone sequences with embedded temporal perturbations. Perturbations occurred every 6-10 tones, and at the locus of the perturbation, tones occurred early, on time, or late. In the absence of perturbations, induced (non-phase-locked) GBA reache...

We measured the influences of power and phase modulations of neuroelectric activity on auditory responses to pure-tone patterns with inter-onset intervals typical of music. Tones were presented to 8 subjects at 10 different tempos from 150 to 3125 ms and with random intervals. We quantified time-frequency (TF) power with respect to a pre-tone-onset...