Perception of temporal patterns is fundamental to normal hearing, speech, motor control, and music. Certain types of pattern understanding are unique to humans, such as musical rhythm. Although human responses to musical rhythm are universal, there is much we do not understand about how rhythm is processed in the brain. Here, I consider findings from research into basic timing mechanisms and models through to the neuroscience of rhythm and meter. A network of neural areas, including motor regions, is regularly implicated (...) in basic timing as well as processing of musical rhythm. However, fractionating the specific roles of individual areas in this network has remained a challenge. Distinctions in activity patterns appear between "automatic" and "cognitively controlled" timing processes, but the perception of musical rhythm requires features of both automatic and controlled processes. In addition, many experimental manipulations rely on participants directing their attention toward or away from certain stimulus features, and measuring corresponding differences in neural activity. Many temporal features, however, are implicitly processed whether attended to or not, making it difficult to create controlled baseline conditions for experimental comparisons. The variety of stimuli, paradigms, and definitions can further complicate comparisons across domains or methodologies. Despite these challenges, the high level of interest and multitude of methodological approaches from different cognitive domains (including music, language, and motor learning) have yielded new insights and hold promise for future progress. (shrink)

The cognition of music, like that of language, is partly rooted in enculturative processes of implicit and incidental learning. Musicians and nonmusicians alike are commonly found to possess detailed implicit knowledge of musical structure which is acquired incidentally through interaction with large samples of music. This paper reports an experiment combining the methodology of artificial grammar learning with musical acquisition of melodic structure. Participants acquired knowledge of grammatical melodic structures under incidental learning conditions in both experimental and untrained control conditions. (...) Subsequent analysis indicates a large effect of unsupervised online learning in the experimental and control group throughout the course of the testing phase suggesting an effective ongoing learning process. Musicians did not outperform nonmusicians, indicating that musical expertise is not advantageous for the learning of a new, unfamiliar melodic system. Confidence ratings suggest that participants became aware of the knowledge guiding their classification performance despite the incidental learning conditions. (shrink)