Physics

Entrainment (biomusicology)

Neuroscience

Auditory cortex

Rhythm

Cognitive psychology

Psychology

Acoustics

Stimulus (psychology)

Computer science

Speech recognition

Electroencephalography

Magnetoencephalography

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Significance Previous work in humans has found rhythmic cortical activity while listening to rhythmic sounds such as speech or music. Whether this activity reflects oscillatory dynamics of a neural circuit or instead evoked responses to the rhythmic stimulus has been difficult to determine. Here, we devised a metric to tease apart the two hypotheses by analyzing phase lag across many stimulation rates. We test this phase concentration metric using numerical simulations and generate quantitative predictions to compare against recorded magnetoencephalography data. Both previously recorded and new data were better predicted by a model of oscillatory dynamics than evoked responses. This work, therefore, provides definitive evidence for the presence of an oscillatory dynamic in auditory cortex during processing of rhythmic stimuli.

An oscillator model better predicts cortical entrainment to music