Science 28Feb2020

974 28 FEBRUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6481 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

PHOTO: A. LESIK/SHUTTERSTOCK

By Daniela Sammler

S

peech and music are human univer-

sals, and people around the world

often blend them together into vocal

songs ( 1 ). This entwinement of the

speech and music cognitive domains is

a challenge for the auditory cognitive

system. How do listeners extract words and

melodies from a single sound wave? The split

is surmised to start in the signal: Speech and

musical sounds are thought to differ in de-

tails of their acoustic structure and thus acti-

vate different receptive preferences of the left

and right auditory cortices of the brain ( 2 , 3 ).

On page 1043 of this issue, Albouy et al. ( 4 )

provide evidence for the biophysical basis of

the long-debated, yet still unresolved, hemi-

spheric asymmetry of speech and music per-

ception in humans. They show that the left

and right auditory regions of the brain con-

tribute differently to the decoding of words

and melodies in songs.

Research on the nature of hemispheric

NEUROSCIENCE

Splitting speech and music

PERSPECTIVES

Brain asymmetries for words and melodies of songs depend on opposite acoustic cues

INSIGHTS

Published by AAAS