Midbrain adaptation may set the stage for the perception of musical beat

The ability to spontaneously feel a beat in music is a phenomenon widely believed to be unique to humans. Though beat perception involves the coordinated engagement of sensory, motor and cognitive processes in humans, the contribution of low-level auditory processing to the activation of these networks in a beat-specific manner is poorly understood. Here,we present evidence froma rodent model that midbrain preprocessing of sounds may already be shaping where the beat is ultimately felt. For the tested set of musical rhythms, on-beat sounds on average evoked higher firing rates than off-beat sounds, and this differencewas a defining feature of the set of beat interpretationsmost commonly perceived by human listeners over others. Basic firing rate adaptation provided a sufficient explanation for these results.Our findings suggest thatmidbrain adaptation, by encoding the temporal context of sounds, creates points of neural emphasis that may influence the perceptual emergence of a beat.