Neural Entrainment to Musical Pulse in Naturalistic Music Is Preserved in Aging: Implications for Music-Based Interventions

Neural entrainment to musical rhythm is thought to underlie the perception and production of music. In aging populations, the strength of neural entrainment to rhythm has been found to be attenuated, particularly during attentive listening to auditory streams. However, previous studies on neural entrainment to rhythm and aging have often employed artificial auditory rhythms or limited pieces of recorded, naturalistic music, failing to account for the diversity of rhythmic structures found in natural music. As part of larger project assessing a novel music-based intervention for healthy aging, we investigated neural entrainment to musical rhythms in the electroencephalogram (EEG) while participants listened to self-selected musical recordings across a sample of younger and older adults. We specifically measured neural entrainment to the level of musical pulse—quantified here as the phase-locking value (PLV)—after normalizing the PLVs to each musical recording’s detected pulse frequency. As predicted, we observed strong neural phase-locking to musical pulse, and to the sub-harmonic and harmonic levels of musical meter. Overall, PLVs were not significantly different between older and younger adults. This preserved neural entrainment to musical pulse and rhythm could support the design of music-based interventions that aim to modulate endogenous brain activity via self-selected music for healthy cognitive aging.