Music, rhythm and the brain

The topic of my research is how musical rhythm entrains the human brain activity.

During my PhD and postdoctoral research, I developed a frequency-tagging approach to capture the brain mechanisms underlying musical rhythm processing.

Currently, I use this approach as a means to investigate the neural mechanisms of entrainment in auditory perception and body movement, sensorimotor synchronization and multisensory integration. To this end, I record the online brain activity with surface or intracerebral electroencephalography (EEG) coupled with body movement, auditory or audiovisual stimulations.

Brain activity is captured from healthy adults and infants, and also in brain-damaged patients, to unravel the mechanisms at the interface of rhythmic inputs, motor skills and brain activity, and to understand the early development and physiopathology of the ability for rhythmic entrainment in humans.

Also, this research gives rise to some thoughts about how and why mixing art and science in research activities.