Researchers identified two brain networks that help us anticipate and identify transitions in music – and these networks look different in musicians and non-musicians
By Grace Wade
26 August 2024
We can enjoy music because of our ability to recognise musical boundaries
NDAB Creativity/Shutterstock
We may finally know how the brain processes a beat drop: people use two distinct brain networks to anticipate and identify transitions between segments in a piece of music.
Musical boundaries, the moments when one section of a composition ends and another begins, are important to our enjoyment of music, particularly from the Western tradition. Otherwise, your favourite hit would sound like a monotonous stream of random sounds, “similar to reading a text with no punctuation”, says Iballa Burunat Perez at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland.
To understand how the brain processes musical boundaries, she and her colleagues analysed brain activity in 36 adults while they listened to three instrumental works from different genres: the Argentinian nuevo tango composition Adiós Nonino by Astor Piazzolla, the US progressive metal piece Stream of Consciousness by Dream Theater and the Russian ballet classic The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. All of the listeners lived in Finland, and half considered themselves semi-professional or professional musicians.
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The researchers found that, right before a musical boundary, a brain network they called the early auditory network activates in anticipation of the musical phrase ending. This network primarily involves auditory areas in the posterior, or back, of the brain’s outer region, called the cortex.
A different network then activates during and after musical transitions. Dubbed the boundary transition network, it is characterised by increased activity in auditory areas toward the middle and anterior, or front, of the cortex. Burunat says the shift in brain activity between these two areas is similar to how our brains understand the differences between sentences in language.