Two core studies were conducted. In the first, rhesus macaques with no prior exposure to music were presented with J.S. Bach’s melodies while EEG and pupillometry were recorded.
Through multivariate temporal response function analysis, neural responses revealed that monkeys generated expectations when listening to real music but not to shuffled controls. Critically, their expectations were based on timing regularities rather than pitch. Pupil dilation further indicated higher engagement during structured music.
In the second study, we tested 49 human newborns exposed to the same musical materials. We showed that newborns, like monkeys, neurally encode rhythmic but not melodic expectations. Real music, but not shuffled sequences, elicited predictive responses. Event-related potential analyses confirmed sensitivity to temporal but not pitch-based surprise. Together, these findings demonstrate that the ability to extract and predict rhythmic structures from music is present at birth and likely phylogenetically conserved, while melodic tracking emerges later through enculturation and experience.
Main achievements include:
• Establishing a fully automatized methodological pipeline that integrates EEG denoising and computational modelling to study predictive processing in naturalistic music and noisy data such as those from macaques and infants.
• Demonstrating for the first time that musically naïve monkeys encode timing-based but not melodic-based expectations in continuous music.
• Providing the first neurophysiological evidence that during naturalistic music listening, human newborns generate statistical rhythmic expectations but not melodic ones.
• Identifying a cross-species dissociation between rhythm and pitch that informs theories of the evolution and development of musicality.
