Music-selective neural populations arise without musical training

What features of a sound does the brain perceive as a pitch? What is the role of rhythm in music?  In this podcast Dr. Nancy Kanwisher ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and PhD candidate Dana Boebinger (Harvard University) discuss how music-selective neural populations are clearly present in people without musical training, demonstrating that they are a fundamental and widespread property of the human brain.   The authors then discuss how music-selective neural populations respond strongly to music from unfamiliar genres as well as music with rhythm but little pitch information, suggesting that they are broadly responsive to music as a whole.

Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00588.2020

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