Simone Dalla Bella

Simone Dalla Bella
Université de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Psychology

PhD
Canada Research Chair (tier 1) in Music Auditory-Motor Skill Learning and New Technologies

About

184
Publications
101,563
Reads
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5,170
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Introduction
Simone Dalla Bella is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Montreal (Canada), and Co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS; https://brams.org/). His lab (https://dallabella-lab.ca/) studies music cognition, in particular individual differences in beat perception and synchronization, and develops theory-driven interventions using music rhythm for improving motor and cognitive functions in clinical populations.
Additional affiliations
June 2018 - present
International Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound Research (BRAMS)
Position
  • Managing Director
January 2018 - present
Université de Montréal
Position
  • Professor (Full)
October 2012 - September 2017
Institut Universitaire de France
Position
  • Junior Member

Publications

Publications (184)
Article
Full-text available
The Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities (BAASTA) is a new tool for the systematic assessment of perceptual and sensorimotor timing skills. It spans a broad range of timing skills aimed at differentiating individual timing profiles. BAASTA consists of sensitive time perception and production tasks. Perceptual tas...
Article
Full-text available
Gait dysfunctions in Parkinson's disease can be partly relieved by rhythmic auditory cueing. This consists in asking patients to walk with a rhythmic auditory stimulus such as a metronome or music. The effect on gait is visible immediately in terms of increased speed and stride length. Moreover, training programs based on rhythmic cueing can have l...
Article
Full-text available
Technologies, such as mobile devices or sets of connected sensors, provide new and engaging opportunities to devise music‐based interventions. Among the different technological options, serious games offer a valuable alternative. Serious games can engage multisensory processes, creating a rich, rewarding, and motivating rehabilitation setting. More...
Article
Full-text available
Humans can easily extract the rhythm of a complex sound, like music, and move to its regular beat, like in dance. These abilities are modulated by musical training and vary significantly in untrained individuals. The causes of this variability are multidimensional and typically hard to grasp in single tasks. To date we lack a comprehensive model ca...
Article
Full-text available
Intentionally walking to the beat of an auditory stimulus seems effortless for most humans. However, studies have revealed significant individual differences in the spontaneous tendency to synchronize. Some individuals tend to adapt their walking pace to the beat, while others show little or no adjustment. To fill this gap we introduce the Ramp pro...
Article
Full-text available
Deficits in rhythm perception and production have been reported in a variety of psychiatric, neurodevelopmental and neurologic disorders. Since correlations between rhythmic abilities and cognitive functions have been demonstrated in neurotypical individuals, we here investigate whether and how rhythmic abilities are associated with cognitive funct...
Article
The speech-to-song illusion is a perceptual effect emerging at the interplay of two cognitive domains, music and language. It arises upon repetitions of a spoken phrase that shifts to being perceived as song, and varies in the likelihood, ease, and vividness of its occurrence among individuals. A prevailing explanation of the illusion suggests that...
Preprint
Full-text available
The speech-to-song illusion is a perceptual effect emerging at the interplay of two cognitive domains, music and language. It arises upon repetitions of a spoken phrase that shifts to being perceived as song, and varies in the likelihood, ease, and vividness of its occurrence among individuals. A prevailing explanation of the illusion suggests that...
Preprint
Neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD can affect rhythm perception and production, impacting the performance in attention and sensorimotor tasks. Improving rhythmic abilities through targeted training might compensate for these cognitive functions. We introduce a novel protocol for training rhythmic skills via a tablet-based serious game called Rh...
Preprint
Full-text available
Intentionally walking to the beat of an auditory stimulus seems effortless for most humans. However, recent studies revealed significant individual differences in the spontaneous tendency to synchronize to the beat. Some individuals tend to adapt their walking pace to the beat while others show little or no adjustment. However, to date, there is no...
Article
Full-text available
Timing and rhythm abilities are complex and multidimensional skills that are highly widespread in the general population. This complexity can be partly captured by the Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities (BAASTA). The battery, consisting of four perceptual and five sensorimotor tests (finger-tapping), has been u...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: The vagus nerve, a crucial component of the parasympathetic nervous system, serves as a vital communication link between the brain and body. Recent studies indicate that auricular stimulation of the vagus nerve can influence executive functions by increasing activity in brain regions like the prefrontal cortex. While prefrontal areas ar...
Preprint
Full-text available
In cognitive science, the sensation of “groove” has been defined as the pleasurable urge to move to music. When listeners rate rhythmic stimuli on derived pleasure and urge to move, ratings on these dimensions are highly correlated. However, recent behavioural and brain imaging work has shown that these two components may be separable. To examine t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Timing and rhythm abilities are complex and multidimensional skills that are highly widespread in the general population. This complexity can be partly captured by the Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities (BAASTA). The battery, consisting of 4 perceptual and 5 sensorimotor tests (finger tapping), has been used in...
Chapter
Full-text available
Music and dance can change our sense of time. They rely on synchronizing our movements with auditory events and with other people, both involve memory and anticipation for audiences and performers alike, and both facilitate moments of flow and pleasure. Performing Time captures the manifold facets of our experience of time in music and dance, from...
Article
Full-text available
Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with reduced coordination abilities. These can result either in random or rigid patterns of movement. The latter, described here as coordination rigidity (CR), have been studied less often. We explored whether CR was present in gait, quiet stance, and speech-tasks involving coordination among multiple joints a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Functional brain imaging has shown that the awake brain, independent of a task, spontaneously switches between a small set of functional networks. How useful this dynamical view of brain activity is for clinical studies, e.g., as early markers of subsequent structural and/or functional change or for assessing successful training or intervention eff...
Preprint
Full-text available
Humans can easily extract the rhythm of a complex sound, like music, and move to its regular beat, for example in dance. These abilities are modulated by musical training and vary significantly in untrained individuals. The causes of this variability are multidimensional and typically hard to grasp with single tasks. To date we lack a comprehensive...
Preprint
Full-text available
Inhibition control is an essential executive function during children's development, underpinning self-regulation and the acquisition of social and language abilities. This executive function is intensely engaged in music training while learning an instrument, a complex multisensory task requiring monitoring motor performance and auditory stream pr...
Article
Full-text available
Major advances in music neuroscience have fueled a growing interest in music‐based neurological rehabilitation among researchers and clinicians. Musical activities are excellently suited to be adapted for clinical practice because of their multisensory nature, their demands on cognitive, language, and motor functions, and music's ability to induce...
Article
Full-text available
Auditory feedback perturbation studies have indicated a link between feedback and feedforward mechanisms in speech production when participants compensate for applied shifts. In spectral perturbation studies, speakers with a higher perceptual auditory acuity typically compensate more than individuals with lower acuity. However, the reaction to feed...
Poster
Full-text available
BACKGROUND AND AIM: Gait is a complex human motor behaviour, involving multiple systems. In some cases, as in Parkinson’s disease, these systems can be deficient and alter locomotion properties, thereby inducing major disability. One possibility to improve gait properties is to train individuals by asking them to walk with external auditory cues. T...
Article
Full-text available
Rhythm disorders are consistently reported in Parkinson’s disease (PD). They manifest across motor domains, such as in orofacial (oral diadochokinesis), manual (finger tapping), and gait tasks. It is still unclear, however, whether these disorders are domain- and task-specific, or result from impaired common mechanisms supporting rhythm processing...
Article
Full-text available
In this multiple single-cases study, we used dance to train Sensorimotor Synchronization (SMS), motor and cognitive functions in children with Developmental Cerebellar Anomalies (DCA). DCA are rare dysfunctions of the cerebellum that affect motor and cognitive skills. The cerebellum plays an important role in temporal cognition including SMS which...
Article
Full-text available
Humans have a remarkable capacity for perceiving and producing rhythm. Rhythmic competence is often viewed as a single concept, with participants who perform more or less accurately on a single rhythm task. However, research is revealing numerous sub-processes and competencies involved in rhythm perception and production, which can be selectively i...
Article
Objectif Notre objectif était d’identifier un trouble de la perception et de la production du rythme chez des personnes avec trouble du comportement en sommeil paradoxal idiopathique (TCSPi) comme futur marqueur de la maladie de Parkinson (MP). Méthodes Nous avons comparé les capacités rythmiques, les caractéristiques cliniques, les symptômes végé...
Article
Full-text available
Temporal accounts of Developmental Dyslexia (DD) postulate that a timing impairment plays an important role in this learning disorder. However, DD has been associated with timing disorders as well as other motor and cognitive dysfunctions. It is still unclear whether nonverbal timing skills per se may be considered as independent determinants of DD...
Preprint
Full-text available
Temporal accounts of Developmental Dyslexia (DD) postulate that a timing impairment plays an important role in this learning disorder. However, DD has been associated with timing disorders as well as other motor and cognitive dysfunctions. It is still unclear whether non-verbal timing skills per se may be considered as independent determinants of D...
Article
Timing abilities help organizing the temporal structure of events but are known to change systematically with age. Yet, how the neuronal signature of temporal predictability changes across the age span remains unclear. Younger (n = 21; 23.1 years) and older adults (n = 21; 68.5 years) performed an auditory oddball task, consisting of isochronous an...
Article
Full-text available
Listeners usually have no difficulties telling the difference between speech and song. Yet when a spoken phrase is repeated several times, they often report a perceptual transformation that turns speech into song. There is a great deal of variability in the perception of the speech-to-song illusion (STS). It may result partly from linguistic proper...
Article
Full-text available
The fields of music, health, and technology have seen significant interactions in recent years in developing music technology for health care and well-being. In an effort to strengthen the collaboration between the involved disciplines, the workshop “Music, Computing, and Health” was held to discuss best practices and state-of-the-art at the inters...
Article
Full-text available
Rhythmic properties of speech and language have been a matter of long-standing debates, with both traditional production and perception studies delivering controversial findings. The present study examines the possibility of investigating linguistic rhythm using movement-based paradigms. Informed by the theory and methods of sensorimotor synchroniz...
Article
Full-text available
Taking regular walks when living with Parkinson’s disease (PD) has beneficial effects on movement and quality of life. Yet, patients usually show reduced physical activity compared to healthy older adults. Using auditory stimulation such as music can facilitate walking but patients vary significantly in their response. An individualized approach ad...
Article
Full-text available
Information coming from multiple senses, as compared to a single one, typically enhances our performance. The multisensory improvement has been extensively examined in perception studies, as well as in tasks involving a motor response like a simple reaction time. However, how this effect extends to more complex behavior, typically involving the coo...
Preprint
Full-text available
The fields of music, health, and technology have seen significant interactions in recent years in developing music technology for health care and well-being. In an effort to strengthen the collaboration between the involved disciplines, the workshop ‘Music, Computing, and Health’ was held to discuss best practices and state-of-the-art at the inters...
Poster
Full-text available
Undergraduate student currently working at BRAMS laboratory, studying cognitive correlates of music on the brain.
Article
Full-text available
Humans spontaneously synchronize their movements with external auditory rhythms such as a metronome or music. Although such synchronization preferentially occurs toward a simple 1:1 movement–sound frequency ratio, the parameters facilitating spontaneous synchronization to more complex frequency ratios remain largely unclear. The present study inves...
Article
Full-text available
In persons with multiple sclerosis (PwMS), synchronizing walking to auditory stimuli such as to music and metronomes have been shown to be feasible, and positive clinical effects have been reported on step frequency and perception of fatigue. Yet, the dynamic interaction during the process of synchronization, such as the coupling of the steps to th...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives: Children with hearing loss (HL), in spite of early cochlear implantation, often struggle considerably with language acquisition. Previous research has shown a benefit of rhythmic training on linguistic skills in children with HL, suggesting that improving rhythmic capacities could help attenuating language difficulties. However, little...
Article
Human rhythmic movements spontaneously synchronize with auditory rhythms at various frequency ratios. The emergence of more complex relationships, for instance, frequency ratios of 1:2 and 1:3, is enhanced by adding a congruent accentuation pattern (binary for 1:2 and ternary for 1:3), resulting in a 1:1 movement–accentuation relationship. However,...
Article
Full-text available
Background/Study context Recent research has shown a benefit of temporally regular structure presented during the maintenance period in short-term memory for young adults. Because maintenance is impaired in aging, we investigated whether older adults can also benefit from the temporal regularities for maintenance and how their cognitive capacities...
Chapter
Full-text available
Rhythmic abilities are widespread in the general population. Most of us can extract the regular beat of music, and align their movements with it. These abilities can be harnessed for the purpose of motor rehabilitation in patients with movement disorders. Fundamental research on beat perception and synchronization to the beat is reviewed, and it is...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: We aimed to identify timing distortions in production and perception of rhythmic events in patients with idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) as early markers of Parkinson's disease (PD). Methods: Rhythmic skills, clinical characteristics, dysautonomia, depression, and olfaction were compared in 97 participants, including 21...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by rhythm disorders, which manifest across motor domains (orofacial, manual and gait), and in perceptual tasks. These disorders may result from a general dysrhythmia, linked to impaired central mechanisms supporting rhythm processing. Rhythmic auditory cueing has been used to improve motor symp...
Article
Full-text available
Individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) experience rhythm disorders in a number of motor tasks such as i) oral diadochokinesis, ii) finger tapping, and iii) gait. These common motor deficits may be signs of “general dysrhythmia”, a central disorder spanning across effectors and tasks, and potentially sharing the same neural substrate. However, to...
Article
Full-text available
Why does human speech have rhythm? As we cannot travel back in time to witness how speech developed its rhythmic properties and why humans have the cognitive skills to process them, we rely on alternative methods to find out. One powerful tool is the comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other spec...
Article
Full-text available
People walking side by side spontaneously synchronize their steps on some occasions but not on others, which poses a challenge to theories of perception-action based on interactive dynamic systems. How can action be spontaneously entrained by some sources of perceptual information while others are selectively ignored? The predictive processing fram...
Article
Full-text available
The relationship between musical and linguistic skills has received particular attention in infants and school-aged children. However, very little is known about pre-schoolers. This leaves a gap in our understanding of the concurrent development of these skills during development. Moreover, attention has been focused on the effects of formal musica...
Article
Humans spontaneously synchronize their movements with external auditory rhythms such as a metronome or music. Although such synchronization preferentially occurs toward simple 1:1 movement-stimulus frequency ratio, the extent to which spontaneous synchronization can also occur toward more complex frequency ratios remains largely unclear. The presen...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Rhythmic perception-action coupling through sensorimotor synchronization has been studied with non-verbal, simple and complex auditory signals like a metronome and music. Applications of the paradigm to language are relatively rare, but could provide a valuable tool for investigating rhythm perception in speech. The aim of the present study is to c...
Preprint
Full-text available
Cognition and communication, at the core of human speech rhythm, do not leave a fossil record. However, if the purpose is to understand the origin and evolution of speech rhythm, alternative methods are available. A powerful tool is comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other species, drawing concl...
Preprint
Full-text available
Cognition and communication, at the core of human speech rhythm, do not leave a fossil record. However, if the purpose is to understand the origin and evolution of speech rhythm, alternative methods are available. A powerful tool is comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other species, drawing concl...
Patent
Full-text available
The BeatHealth system aims to develop a mobile music listening device synchronizing in a personalized way music and movement, and dedicated to improving the kinematics of the runner. Thanks to inertial units connected to a smartphone, the runner's steps are detected in real time by the mobile application. A dedicated algorithm adapts the pulsation...
Article
Rhythmic abilities are highly widespread in the general population. Most people can extract the regular beat of music, and align their movements with it. The aim of a translational approach for music and movement is to build on current fundamental research and theories of beat perception and synchronization to devise music-based interventions which...