The right sound at the right time: Cerebellar and ventral striatal involvement in imitating pitch and timing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Acting on the world requires the right action at the right time. This is perhaps most easily seen in music where the meaning of a piece is encoded explicitly by both the pitches of musical notes and their duration. We used these features to operationalise the production of desired qualia of movements as note pitches as compared to movement timing as note durations. Participants listened to and imitated simple melodies as accurately as possible while lying in an ultra-high field 7T MRI scanner. Melodies consisted of either a series of different pitches of equal duration or a single pitch repeated at different durations. Both tasks engaged a broad motor network similar to speech and other complex dynamic movements. However, imitation for timing preferentially activated the ventral striatum of the basal ganglia while imitation for pitch preferentially activated lobule VI of the cerebellum and temporal lobe auditory association areas. These findings are consistent with the role of the basal ganglia in sound sequence learning and with the role of the cerebellum in refining movement based on sensory feedback. Imitating melodies provides a simple but effective framework for manipulating the qualities and timings of sound production by the speech-motor system, even when no words are spoken. • Imitation by singing or whistling is an effective probe of the “speech” motor system. • Singing and whistling are complementary probes for distinct subsets of the speech musculature. • Imitating stimuli with complex pitch patterns increases activation of the cerebellum (lobule VI). • Imitating stimuli with complex timing patterns increases activation of the basal ganglia (ventral striatum).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it