Complex impact of stimulus envelope on motor synchronization to sound

The human brain tracks temporal regularities in acoustic signals faithfully. Recent neuroimaging studies have shown complex modulations of synchronized neural activities to the shape of stimulus envelopes. How to connect neural responses to different envelope shapes with listeners’ perceptual ability to synchronize to acoustic rhythms requires further characterization. Here we examine participants’ motor and sensory synchronization to noise stimuli with periodic amplitude modulations (AM). We used three envelope shapes that varied in the sharpness of amplitude onset. In a synchronous motor finger-tapping task, we show that participants more consistently align their taps to the same phase of stimulus envelope when listening to stimuli with sharp onsets than to those with gradual onsets. This effect is replicated in a sensory synchronization task, suggesting a sensory basis for the facilitated phase alignment to sharp-onset stimuli. Surprisingly, despite less consistent tap alignments to the envelope of gradual-onset stimuli, participants are equally effective in extracting the rate of amplitude modulation from both sharp and gradual-onset stimuli, and they tapped consistently at that rate alongside the acoustic input. This result demonstrates that robust tracking of the rate of acoustic periodicity is achievable without the presence of sharp acoustic edges or consistent phase alignment to stimulus envelope. Our findings are consistent with assuming distinct processes for phase and rate tracking during sensorimotor synchronization. These processes may be underpinned by different neural mechanisms whose relative strengths are modulated by specific temporal dynamics of stimulus envelope characteristics.