Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Musical expertise is often associated with heightened perceptual sensitivity to external sensory stimuli, yet its relationship with internal bodily awareness (interoception) remains elusive. This study examined whether interoceptive ability relates differentially to varying levels of singing expertise and explored if interoception could predispose individuals to musical skills. Professional singers, amateur singers, and non-singers completed a heartbeat discrimination task (interoceptive accuracy; IAcc), self-reported interoceptive sensibility assessment, and comprehensive musical competence measures. Results demonstrated a significant positive association between singing expertise and IAcc, which notably emerged only in professional singers, who significantly outperformed both amateur singers and non-singers. Regression analyses indicated a moderate predictive role of accumulated singing practice for IAcc among trained singers, though emotional awareness partially mediated the relationship between expertise and IAcc. Critically, higher IAcc in non-singers significantly correlated with superior singing accuracy, suggesting enhanced interoception may facilitate singing competence independently of formal vocal training. Altogether, these findings highlight a dual role of interoception, linking it to expert-level singing--partially mediated by emotional awareness-- and independently to musical competence in non-singers. These results reconcile prior inconsistencies by highlighting the embodied nature of singing and the distinct role of musical expertise, while underscoring inherent musically relevant mechanisms beyond practice alone.

Music is a fundamental medium for human communication, yet it remains unclear whether it enables genuine alignment of internally felt emotions beyond mere emotion perception. Creative expression may be central to this process: when performers improvise with creative intent, they engage in self-expression that could draw listeners into closer emotional and physiological resonance. Here, dual-electrocardiography was recorded across 37 performer-listener dyads while performers generated live improvisations under conventional, unconventional, or creative instructions. We show that creative improvisation enhances dyadic emotional alignment for both valence and arousal, and increases cardiac synchronization. Performer-listener alignment was strongest when performers felt and expressed emotions were themselves aligned, and when listeners showed a gradual arousal buildup. Creativity also elicited higher sublimity, lower unease and vitality, and greater diversity of selected emotional labels. These findings establish creativity as a mechanism through which music achieves one of its most celebrated functions: the creation of shared human experience.

Isochrony - as in the regular beat of a metronome - is cross-culturally ubiquitous in music. Is this ubiquity due to a widespread biological inclination for acoustic communication having isochronous structure? If so, it should be present in lesser-studied vocal music, in the absence of musical training, and in comparable non-human species vocalizations. We quantified isochrony in an untrained expression of musicality: improvised songs from non-musician adults and children. We also tested for isochrony in songs from zebra finches, a bird that learns complex songs. We analyzed improvised songs from children (n = 38, 3-10 years old) and adult non-musicians (n = 15, 24-82 years old), and songs from juvenile and adult zebra finches (n= 77, [~]50 and 120 days post-hatch, respectively). Isochrony was expressed in non-musicians improvised songs, and in childrens improvised songs to a comparable degree. In contrast, both juvenile and adult zebra finches produced songs with less isochrony than chance. And although zebra finches learn sequences and durations of their songs elements, we found no evidence for the learning of isochrony. These data show that spontaneous isochrony in learned vocalizations appears differently across these two species. We propose that species variation in chorusing behaviors may explain why.

People synchronize their behavioural and physiological rhythms with each other during social interaction. While interpersonal synchronization has largely been associated with positive effects such as social bonding, some evidence suggests that it may also impair self-regulation and disrupt intrapersonal coordination. Because respiration and heart rhythms are weakly coupled within individuals, we investigated whether synchronizing breathing with another person alters intra-personal cardiorespiratory coupling. Across two experiments, participants synchronized their breathing reciprocally (bidirectional interaction), unidirectionally with a confederate, or with pre-recorded breathing signals, while respiration and electrocardiography (ECG) were continuously measured. Relative phase analyses revealed that bidirectional breathing synchronization induced in-phase synchronization of heart rhythms between individuals. Critically, interpersonal synchronization coincided with cardiorespiratory decoupling: respiration and heart rhythms became more out-of-phase during interaction compared to resting baselines and the unidirectional condition. Moreover, stronger interpersonal respiratory synchronization predicted greater intra-personal cardiorespiratory decoupling, particularly when participants adapted their own breathing to another persons. These findings provide evidence that interpersonal physiological synchronization entails a trade-off with intra-personal physiological coupling, perturbing the phase relationship within ones own physiological system. We propose that aligning ones physiological rhythms with others strengthens self-other coupling but weakens intrapersonal coupling, pointing to a physiological mechanism of self-decoupling during social interaction. Graphical abstractWhen two people synchronize their breathing together, their heart rhythms also synchronize, while their intrapersonal cardiorespiratory rhythms become decoupled, with a perturbed phase-relationship between respiration and cardiac rhythms. Across two experiments, stronger interpersonal respiratory synchronization was associated with more pronounced intrapersonal cardiorespiratory decoupling. These findings suggest a physiological trade-off: aligning bodily rhythms with others strengthens self-other coupling, but may coincide with a phase shift in ones intrinsic cardiorespiratory rhythm. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=96 SRC="FIGDIR/small/679159v2_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (16K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@17e4675org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@143bf94org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@d6b841org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@dab5e2_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

Degradation of motor control across the adult lifespan due to neurobiological decay is well-established. Correspondences between the dynamics of motor behaviour and the timing of musical performance are also well-documented. In light of the former, the conspicuous absence of age as a mediating factor in investigation of the latter reveals a remarkable gap in our understanding of creative performance across the life course. To examine effects of ageing on musical timing, physical tempo of almost 2000 songs released by top-tier recording artists over their decades-long careers were annotated via a listening and tapping task. A series of regression analyses revealed i) an age-driven downward trend in performance tempo for all artists, ii) significant between-artist variation across time, and iii) within-artist variation that was independent of broader musical trends. Overall, tempo decreased by almost one and a half standard deviations from artists early twenties to their late fifties, a rate of decline comparable to that observed in studies of spontaneous motor tempo. Results are consistent with the slowing-with-age hypothesis, and reveal that, not only is such tempo decline discernible in commercial recordings, the impact of age on tempo is overwhelming for artists most physically connected with their music.

Rhythmic ability has been studied for more than a century in laboratory settings testing timed finger taps. While robust results emerged, it remains unclear whether these findings reflect behavioral limitations in realistic scenarios. This study tested the synchronization-continuation task in a museum with 455 visitors of a wide variety of ages (5-74yrs), musical experiences (0-40yrs) and educational and cultural backgrounds. Adopting a dynamic systems perspective, three metronome pacing periods were anchored around each individuals preferred tempo, and 20% faster and 20% slower. Key laboratory findings were replicated and extended: timing error and variability decreased during childhood and increased in older adults and were lower, even with moderate musical experience. Consistent with an oscillator perspective, timing at non-preferred tempi drifted toward their preferred rate. Overall, these findings demonstrate that timing limitations may reflect attractor properties of a neural oscillator and its signature is still present even in noisy, naturalistic settings.

Empathy enables individuals to attune to others' experiences through shared affective, sensorimotor, and neural representations, but its influence on higher-level decision-making and social alignment remains unknown. We examined whether empathy promotes social conformity and whether this effect depends on physiological arousal, visual attention, and socio-emotional traits. Seventy-three participants completed an empathy-for-pain task followed by a modified random-dot task in which they interacted with previously seen empathy targets, while physiological signals and eye movements were recorded. Drift-diffusion modeling showed that feedback from empathy targets increased conformity, reflected in stronger decision bias toward targets, faster evidence accumulation, and reduced decision conservatism. Visual attention to the eyes or mouth was linked to greater conformity depending on the context. Heart rate variability was unrelated to conformity, whereas phasic skin conductance was associated with smaller bias changes and greater conservatism. Alexithymia and autistic traits further shaped the empathy-conformity relationships. These findings suggest that empathic shared representation extends beyond affective resonance to influence social alignment in decision-making.

While sounds are essential for human development, existing research primarily emphasizes visual and spatial memory and speech in relation to auditory processes, with a lack of a cohesive understanding of memory mechanisms for non-verbal sounds. This systematic review and coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging findings aims to comprehensively organize the literature for identifying the key brain mechanisms involved in short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory for non-verbal auditory information. Additionally, we aimed to identify whether and how individual differences in neural memory processes related to auditory expertise (musicianship), aging or auditory impairments such as amusia are explored in the literature. Our review included ninety studies meeting the selection criteria, with only thirteen studies containing brain coordinates could be included in the meta-analysis. The coordinate-based meta-analysis identified a frontal hub for non-verbal auditory memory encompassing the medial frontal gyrus, cingulate gyrus and superior frontal gyrus.

Our brain maps the space immediately surrounding the body, the peripersonal space (PPS), to sharpen sensory-motor coordination whenever an object enters it. Within PPS, past research demonstrated how several factors influence motor readiness: from exogenous factors, such as body-object distance and stimulus semantics, to endogenous traits like personality traits. Nevertheless, most paradigms rely on vision or touch, relegating hearing to a supporting role and leaving auditory-only contributions unclear. Here, we tested whether affective content and individual traits modulate motor planning for looming sounds that stop within PPS. Thirty-three adults completed three auditory-only tasks in which positive, negative, or neutral sounds halted at five simulated distances from the participants ears (0.3-0.7 m). We recorded anticipatory postural adjustments, distance estimates, affective ratings, and sensory suggestibility via a questionnaire. Motor responses were largely anticipated as sounds stopped nearer the body, while delayed and less precise for semantic (positive or negative) than neutral sounds. Higher suggestibility predicted longer and more variable premotor latencies, particularly for non-semantic sounds. These findings show that auditory cues alone engage flexible sensorimotor mechanisms within PPS, where exogenous (distance, semantics) and endogenous (suggestibility) factors jointly shape motor readiness and spatial perception.

Subjective experiences are hard to capture quantitatively without losing depth and nuance, and subjective report analyses are time-consuming, their interpretation contested. We describe Temporal Experience Tracing, a method that captures relevant aspects of the unified conscious experience over a continuous period of time. The continuous multidimensional description of an experience allows us to computationally reconstruct common experience states. Applied to data from 852 meditations - from novice (n=20) and an experienced (n=12) meditators practising Breathing, Loving-Kindness and Open-Monitoring meditation - we reconstructed four recurring experience states with an average duration of 6:46 min (SD = 5:50 min) and their transition dynamics. Three of the experience states assimilated the three meditation styles practiced, and a fourth experience state represented a common low-motivational, off-task state for both groups. We found that participants in both groups spent more time in the task-related experience state during Loving Kindness meditation than other meditation styles and were less likely to transition into an off-task experience state during Loving Kindness meditation than during Breathing meditation. We demonstrate that drawing the dynamics of experience enables the quantitative analysis of subjective experiences, transforming the time dimension of the stream of consciousness from narrative to measurable.

This study examines the temporal dynamics of expressive piano performance by means of a quantitative analysis of motor timing in an elite pianist, with particular reference to stylistic contrasts between Baroque and Romantic repertoire. In line with kinematic models of expressive timing, which describe musical performance as reflecting principles of biological motion, we examined whether a common temporal structure underlies stylistically divergent executions. Despite marked differences in structural complexity and gesture density, both performances exhibited a shared low-frequency oscillatory pattern ([~]0.36 Hz) in beat-level timing variability. This infra-delta rhythmic modulation is consistent with the presence of an underlying motor timing scaffold and suggests a common temporal organization across expressive behaviors. These findings support the hypothesis that musical performance relies on a rhythmically structured control architecture, potentially shared with other complex motor activities such as speech and locomotion.

Oxytocin has been proposed as a pharmacological target for social dysfunction. However, clinical trials of exogenous oxytocin have yielded modest and inconsistent benefits, highlighting the need for naturalistic, non-pharmacological approaches that recruit endogenous oxytocin. This prospective observational field study examined whether live sports spectating in a modest collegiate setting engages endogenous oxytocin and heart rate synchrony, and how these processes relate to social bonding. Sixty casual spectators at two university basketball games provided salivary samples for oxytocin and cortisol and completed psychological questionnaires before the game, at halftime, and after the game, while heart rate was continuously recorded. Oxytocin dynamics were baseline dependent: individuals with low pre-game oxytocin showed clear increases during spectating, whereas those with high pre-game oxytocin maintained elevated concentrations; across both groups, cortisol decreased and the oxytocin-to-cortisol ratio increased, indicating a shift toward an oxytocin-dominant, low-stress hormonal profile. Live spectating also enhanced heart rate synchrony between spectators, and higher oxytocin levels and stronger synchrony were associated with greater enjoyment, stronger unity with players and fellow fans, higher flow, and stronger intention to revisit. Mediation analyses indicated that perceived unity mediated links between physiological responses and experiential outcomes. These findings identify coordinated oxytocin dynamics and physiological synchrony as candidate mechanisms through which live sports spectating can foster social connection and positive psychological states in everyday, low-stakes settings. Live sports events may represent a simple, scalable non-pharmacological approach to engaging oxytocin-related systems and interpersonal synchrony to promote social connection in everyday life.

Musical training has been associated with enhanced neural processing of sounds, as measured via the frequency following response (FFR), implying the potential for human subcortical neural plasticity. We conducted a large-scale multi-site preregistered study (n > 260) to replicate and extend the findings underpinning this important relationship. We failed to replicate any of the major findings published previously in smaller studies. Musical training was related neither to enhanced spectral encoding strength of a speech stimulus (/da/) in babble nor to a stronger neural-stimulus correlation. Similarly, the strength of neural tracking of a speech sound with a time-varying pitch was not related to either years of musical training or age of onset of musical training. Our findings provide no evidence for plasticity of early auditory responses based on musical training and exposure.

After a right hemisphere stroke, more than half of the patients are impaired in their capacity to produce or comprehend speech prosody. Yet, and despite its social-cognitive consequences for patients, aprosodia following stroke has received scant attention. In this report, we introduce a novel, simple psychophysical procedure which, by combining systematic digital manipulations of speech stimuli and reverse-correlation analysis, allows estimating the internal sensory representations that subtend how individual patients perceive speech prosody, and the level of internal noise that govern behavioral variability in how patients apply these representations. Tested on a sample of N=22 right-hemisphere stroke survivors and N=12 healthy controls, the representation+noise model provides a promising alternative to the clinical gold standard for evaluating aprosodia (MEC): both parameters strongly associate with receptive, and not expressive, aprosodia measured by MEC within the patient group; they have better sensitivity than MEC for separating high-functioning patients from controls; and have good specificity with respect to non-prosody-related impairments of auditory attention and processing. Taken together, individual differences in either internal representation, internal noise, or both, paint a potent portrait of the variety of sensory/cognitive mechanisms that can explain impairments of prosody processing after stroke.

In non-verbal communication, observers infer emotions from visible facial movements, yet emotional experiences are described in internal bodily terms (e.g., "my heart skipped a beat"). This contrast highlights a tension between external sensory cues and internal signals. In this context, we examined an overlooked gap in affective science: what makes an emotional portrayal believable, and do believability judgments reflect only what observers can see or also the portraying person's internal cardiac dynamics? To test this, we created 311 scenario-driven acting clips designed to avoid prototypical posed displays. For each clip, we quantified facial movement magnitude from the video, recorded ECG during preparation and enactment, and collected actors' self-reports. Online participants (N = 371) viewed these clips and provided emotion recognition responses and continuous ratings of believability, valence, or arousal. The results show that believability decreased as movement magnitude increased, with a non-linear relationship indicating a stronger penalty as motion increased. Valence further shaped this pattern, with increasing movement reducing believability more strongly for portrayals with negative valence. This effect persisted after accounting for intended emotion, perceived arousal, and emotion recognizability. Cardiac dynamics varied during performance, and actors' higher heart rate variability was associated with higher believability for positively valenced portrayals. Together, these findings show that believability is driven by visible movement cues interpreted in relation to valence, with actors' cardiac dynamics showing selective alignment with believability. These results identify core components of believable emotional expressions and provide a basis for studying such judgments in everyday social interaction.

Isolating relevant sounds in the auditory stream is a crucial feature accomplished by human infants and a pivotal ability for language acquisition. Therefore, it is reasonable to postulate the existence of early mechanisms reorienting attention toward salient acoustic stimuli. Previous studies suggest that infants consider consonant sounds as more salient than dissonant ones, because the former resemble human vocalizations. However, systematic evidence investigating the neural processes underlying consonance tuning in newborns is still scarce. Here, we investigate newborns ability to recognize and learn salient auditory stimuli by collecting Mismatch Responses (MMRs) to consonant and dissonant sounds and by computing the trial-by-trial correlation of the neural signal with Bayesian Surprise (a theoretical measure of learning). We present 22 healthy newborns (40.4 {+/-} 15.8 hours) with a pseudo-random sequence of deviant and standard auditory events, while we record their electroencephalogram. Our results show that newborns exhibit a neural encoding of auditory regularities for all sound types (consonant and dissonant), as demonstrated by the presence of MMRs and significant correlation of the neural signal with Bayesian Surprise. Furthermore, consonant and dissonant sounds elicited MMRs and correlations with Bayesian Surprise of opposite polarities, with consonant auditory stimulation evoking negative responses, reminiscent of an adult-like MMR. Overall, our findings suggest that newborns display a dedicated perceptual learning mechanism for salient consonant sounds. We speculate that this mechanism might represent an evolutionary-achieved neural tuning to detect and learn salient auditory stimuli with acoustic features resembling human vocalizations. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTDiscriminating salient sounds in noisy sensory streams is a fundamental ability displayed by human infants, pivotal for acquiring crucial skills including language. Our study shed light on this ability by: (1) investigating perceptual learning mechanisms in newborns with a neurocomputational approach; (2) exploring the role of salient consonant sounds in modulating such mechanisms. Since human vocalizations are often consonant, the presence of a mechanism dedicated to enhance the processing of consonant sounds in newborns would confer evolutionary advantages. Our findings, indicating that newborns possess a dedicated and more refined perceptual learning mechanism to process consonance, corroborates this hypothesis. We speculate that this neural mechanism might facilitate the identification of salient acoustic input and support language acquisition in early infancy.

Stability of timing and force production in repetitive movements characterizes skillful motor behaviors such as surgery and playing musical instruments. However, even trained individuals such as musicians undergo further extensive training for the improvement of these skills. Previous studies that investigated the lower extremity movements such as jumping and sprinting demonstrated enhancement of the maximum force and rate of force development immediately after the plyometric exercises. However, it remains unknown whether the plyometric exercises enhance the stability of timing and force production of the dexterous finger movements in trained individuals. Here we address this issue by examining the effects of plyometric-like training specialized for finger movements on piano performance by well-trained pianists. The training demonstrated a decrease of the variation in timing and velocity of successive keystrokes, along with a concomitant increase in the rate of force development of the four fingers, but not the thumb, although there was no change in the finger muscular activities through the training. By contrast, such a training effect was not evident following a conventional repetitive piano practice. In addition, a significant increase in the forearm muscle temperature was observed specifically through performing the plyometric exercise with the fingers, implying its association with improved performance. These results indicate effectiveness of the plyometric exercises for improvement of strength, precision, and physiological efficiency of the finger movements even in expert pianists, which implicates a role of ways of practicing in enhancing experts expertise.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between music, which is said to promote well-being, and emotions as well as bodily sensations across the lifespan. Using eight chord progressions based on predictive models, we conducted online experiments with 784 participants aged 10 to 80, evaluating bodily sensation mapping and emotional responses. The results revealed that bodily sensations peaked in the 20s to 30s and subsequently declined with age, particularly for chords with low prediction error and uncertainty. On the other hand, arousal levels increased with age and showed a strong correlation with predictable musical structures. These findings suggest that bottom-up bodily responses diminish with ageing, while supporting the relationship between top-down processing shaped by accumulated experience and the predictability of music, as indicated by previous research. This study enhances the development of music-based interventions that improve well-being across generations, considering the unique physical and emotional characteristics of each age group.

BackgroundMusic is widely deployed to enhance exercise, yet far less is known about how an exercisers real-time physiological state feeds back to shape musical liking. Wearable sensors now permit second-by-second coupling of gait dynamics, activity load, and affective response. ObjectiveWe developed a mobile workflow that predicts immediate like versus dislike judgments for unfamiliar songs by fusing clinical-grade inertial kinematics (Ambulosono), passive smartphone activity logs (Google Fit), and a single high-knees/low-knees gesture. The study tested whether momentary movement intensity biases preference, identified the strongest biometric predictors, and evaluated a sensor-aware classifier suitable for adaptive playlists. MethodsSeventy-three healthy undergraduates performed fifty 60-second stepping-in-place trials while listening to tempo-normalised tracks spanning five genres. Ambulosono units sampled lower-limb acceleration at 200 Hz; Google Fit recorded pre- and post-trial step counts. Four gait features--mean and peak cadence, mean and peak step length--were normalised and averaged into a Composite Motivation Score (CMS). Breathlessness and fatigue ratings were logged after each track. A 500-tree random forest trained on gait variables, activity counts, perceptual deltas, and CMS classified preference using 10-fold cross-validation. Statistical tests compared liked and disliked trials for physiological change and speed strata. ResultsThe protocol yielded 3 864 complete song exposures. Participants judged 54 % of tracks liked and 60 % disliked (paired t = -2.11, p = 0.036). Disliked trials exhibited larger breathlessness and fatigue increases (Wilcoxon p < 0.05). High-CMS trials showed a 68 % like-rate versus 37 % in low-CMS trials. The classifier achieved 0.78 accuracy and 0.82 AUC; permutation analysis ranked post-trial Google Fit steps, bout duration, and pre-trial steps as top predictors. Track-level analysis revealed that the ten most-disliked songs coincided with the highest mean stepping speeds, despite non-significant effects at coarse speed tiers. ConclusionsImmediate bodily engagement and short-term physiological strain strongly colour musical appraisal. Integrating wearable kinematics, smartphone step counts, and low-friction gestures enables accurate, interpretable prediction of liking, paving the way for context-adaptive playlists and emotionally intelligent rehabilitation cues.

A balanced mind, or equanimity, cultivated through meditation and other spiritual practices, is considered one of the highest mental states. Its core features include deidentification and non-duality. Despite its significance, its neural correlates remain unknown. To address this, we acquired 128-channel EEG data (n = 103) from advanced and novice meditators (from the Isha Yoga tradition) and controls during an internal attention (breath-watching) and an external attention task (visual-oddball paradigm). We calculated the auto-correlation window (ACW), a measure of brains intrinsic neural timescales (INTs) and assessed equanimity through self-report questionnaires. Advanced meditators showed higher levels of equanimity and shorter duration of INTs (shorter ACW) during breath-watching, indicating deidentification with mental contents. Furthermore, they demonstrated no significant differences in INTs between tasks, indicating non-dual awareness. Finally, shorter duration of INTs correlated with the participants subjective perceptions of equanimity. In conclusion, we show that the shorter duration of brains INT may serve as a neural marker of equanimity.