Feindel Brain & Mind Series: Jérémie Ginzburg

From Sound to Meaning: Neural Coding Principles Underlying Speech and Music Perception

Abstract: The ability to distinguish speech from music is a hallmark of human auditory cognition, yet the neural principles supporting this distinction remain debated. Competing theories propose either specialized cortical networks dedicated to distinct sound categories or a domain-general organization in which categorical perception emerges from efficient coding of acoustic features. To support the latter view, a growing body of evidence suggests that the brain’s representation of sounds can be understood in terms of spectrotemporal modulations—joint variations in frequency and time that capture essential features of natural auditory scenes. By examining how the auditory cortex encodes these modulations, our recent intracranial recordings reveal that patterns of neural activity aligned with these features are sufficient to predict whether a sound is perceived as speech or music. This perspective supports a domain-general framework in which the brain’s sensitivity to fundamental acoustic statistics gives rise to higher-order perceptual categories, linking the physics of sound to the emergence of meaning.

Bio: Jérémie Ginzburg is a postdoctoral researcher in the Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience laboratory at McGill university, led by Prof. Zatorre. He previously achieved his PhD at the Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon (France), under the supervision of Dr. Caclin, where he studied behavioral and neurophysiological markers of verbal and musical cognition during child development. He is now studying efficient neural coding of naturalistic complex sounds using intracranial recordings and 7-Tesla fMRI.

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