Data from: 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 from a rodent model that midbrain
pre-processing 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
difference was a defining feature of the set of beat interpretations most
commonly perceived by human listeners over others. Basic firing rate
adaptation provided a sufficient explanation for these results. Our
findings suggest that midbrain adaptation, by encoding the temporal
context of sounds, creates points of neural emphasis that may influence
the perceptual emergence of a beat.