Modulation of the motor cortex during singing-voice perception

Several studies on action observation have shown that the biological dimension of movement modulates sensorimotor interactions in perception. In the present fMRI study, we tested the hypothesis that the biological dimension of sound modulates the involvement of the motor system in human auditory perception, using musical tasks. We first localized the vocal motor cortex in each participant. Then we compared the BOLD response to vocal, semi-vocal and non-vocal melody perception, and found greater activity for voice perception in the right sensorimotor cortex. We additionally ran a psychophysiological interaction analysis with the right sensorimotor as a seed, showing that the vocal dimension of the stimuli enhanced the connectivity between the seed region and other important nodes of the auditory dorsal stream. Finally, the participants' vocal ability was negatively correlated to the voice effect in the Inferior Parietal Lobule. These results suggest that the biological dimension of singing-voice impacts the activity within the auditory dorsal stream, probably via a facilitated matching between the perceived sound and the participant motor representations.