
==== Front
Commun Psychol
Commun Psychol
Communications Psychology
2731-9121
Nature Publishing Group UK London

136
10.1038/s44271-024-00136-y
Research Highlight
Cognitive neuroscience: the brain’s symphony in hearing speech and music
Lui Troby Ka-Yan troby.lui@nature.com

Communications Psychology, https://www.nature.com/commspsychol/

13 9 2024
13 9 2024
2024
2 85© Springer Nature Limited 2024
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
New research shows that the brain employs similar anatomical regions but specific neural oscillatory patterns during speech and music perception.

Subject terms

Cognitive neuroscience
Human behaviour
issue-copyright-statement© Springer Nature Limited 2024
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pmcThe linguistic left brain and the musical right brain: speech and music perception are commonly believed to be dichotomized in our brain. Neuroscientific research, however, has shown mixed results in recent years. While some studies showed dedicated brain regions to speech and music, respectively, others argued for a shared neural mechanism by which the brain responds to both acoustical information.Agustin/Generated with AI/Stock.adobe.com

How specialized is our brain when we listen to speech or music? Te Rietmolen and colleagues from the Aix-Marseille University addressed this contentious issue by asking epileptic patients to listen to natural speech and music1. Recording electrical activities directly in the brain, they were able to map not only the neural responses in different brain regions, but also neural oscillatory activities that wax and wane at different time scales.

The results suggest that we need to take both the spatial and spectral dimensions into consideration. Spatially, a majority (c.a. 70%) of anatomical regions along the auditory pathways responded to both speech and music. These regions include, but are not limited to, auditory cortex, left superior middle temporal gyrus, and frontal gyri. However, different anatomical regions selectively responded to speech or music at a specific frequency. Take the left anterior middle temporal gyrus as an example: globally, its slower neural fluctuations (1–4 Hz, delta frequency band) selectively responded to music, while its faster neural dynamics (30–50 Hz, low gamma band) showed more selective responses to speech. Such spectral selectivity is also evident for neural connectivity: brain regions communicate at certain frequencies specifically for speech or music.

Taken together, this study demonstrates that the brain engages spatially general but spectrally specific networks for speech and music perception, the two central domains in audition. It highlights the importance of taking a fine-grained mapping approach when understanding cognition.

Competing interests

The author declares no competing interests.

Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
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Reference

1. Te Rietmolen N Mercier MR Trébuchon A Morillon B Schön D Speech and music recruit frequency-specific distributed and overlapping cortical networks eLife 2024 13 RP94509 10.7554/eLife.94509.3 39038076
Te Rietmolen, N., Mercier, M. R., Trébuchon, A., Morillon, B. & Schön, D. Speech and music recruit frequency-specific distributed and overlapping cortical networks. eLife 13, RP94509 (2024).39038076 10.7554/eLife.94509.3
