The interplay between cortical tracking and functional connectivity in musicians and non-musicians listening to speech and music

Musicians showed enhanced MEG cortical tracking and enhanced audiomotor functional connectivity during both speech and piano-music listening, alongside better rhythmic abilities than non-musicians.

• Why it matters: The study addresses whether musical expertise yields domain-general auditory benefits and whether rhythm-related mechanisms, cortical tracking, and audiomotor interactions explain them.
• What they did: MEG compared expert musicians and non-musicians while they listened to two-minute stories and piano excerpts, and behavioral rhythmic speech-syllable production was measured. Alpha connectivity between right auditory cortex and inferior frontal gyrus negatively predicted cortical tracking in the speech condition across participants.
• The result: Stronger cortical tracking in musicians appears linked to domain-general auditory sensory differences rather than motor influences in this experiment, with a possible tracking–communication trade-off for speech perception in clear listening.