Great expectations in music: violation of rhythmic expectancies elicits late frontal gamma activity nested in theta oscillations
Mohammadreza Edalati, Mahdi Mahmoudzadeh, Javad Safaie, Fabrice, Wallois, Sahar Moghimi

TL;DR
This study investigates how the brain's oscillatory activity responds to rhythmic violations in music, revealing that late gamma activity nested in theta oscillations reflects the updating of predictive models during rhythm perception.
Contribution
It uncovers the specific oscillatory responses, including late gamma activity nested in theta oscillations, associated with processing rhythmic deviations and updating predictive models in the brain.
Findings
Rhythmic deviations elicited MMN and P3a responses.
Late gamma activity was observed only for rhythmic deviants, not omissions.
Gamma oscillations correlated with P3a amplitude and nested in theta oscillations.
Abstract
Rhythm processing involves building expectations according to the hierarchical temporal structure of auditory events. Although rhythm processing has been addressed in the context of predictive coding, the properties of the oscillatory response in different cortical areas is still not clear. We explored the oscillatory properties of the neural response to rhythmic incongruence and explored the cross-frequency coupling between multiple frequencies to provide links between the concepts of predictive coding and rhythm perception. We designed an experiment to investigate the neural response to rhythmic deviations in which the tone either arrived earlier than expected or the tone in the same metrical position was omitted. These two manipulations modulate the rhythmic structure differently, with the former creating a larger violation of the general structure of the musical stimulus than the…
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