Musical rhythm embedded in the brain : bridging music, neuroscience, and empirical aesthetics

Entrainment to music seems ubiquitous in human cultures. The impact of musical features on individuals has already been explored extensively in music theory, anthropology and psychology. In contrast, it is a relatively new field in neuroscience. Recently, a wave of neuroscience research has grown up exploring the interaction with music in both human and non-human brains, and in evolutionary terms. This chapter briefly reviews some of the biological evidence of music processing, particularly focusing on how the human brain interacts with musical rhythm. The neural entrainment to musical rhythm is proposed as a model particularly well-suited to address objectively, within an experimental set up, how biological rules shape music perception within a limited range of complexity. However, these limits are not fixed. Other aspects such as familiarity, culture, training and context continuously shape brain responses to rhythms and to music in general. Taken together, these studies propose answers to the question of how natural and cultural constraints shape each other, building a vivid motor of aesthetic evolution.