Objective: We investigated the time perception of Parkinson´s disease (PD) patients under the condition of music perception by detecting their individual temporal discrimination ability and their just noticeable difference (JND).

Background: Several psychophysical studies have shown that patients with PD have deficits in perceiving time and rhythms, notably beat-based rhythmic structures (Grahn & Brett, 2009), due to a malfunction of the basal ganglia (BG) network. Only a few studies have focused on the perception of musical structures in PD.

Methods: In a temporal discrimination task using a short melody implicating a clear beat-based rhythm 26 patients under L-Dopa administration and 21 probands at the age of 45 up to 80 years had to detect an artificial interval in the range of milliseconds in the middle of a musical period. The melodic and rhythmic characteristics of the musical sequence corresponded to the gestalt principles.

Results: A significance was detected between 220-300ms (*p=0.0200). In this time window a statistical significance could also be observed according to the severity of the disease (*p=0.0452). PD patients did not show any significant deficit of their JND in comparison to controls (*p=0.0565). Furthermore, no significant difference was found according to the severity of the disease. A significant difference between the group with higher and lower musical comprehension could be ascertained (*p=0.0343).

Conclusions: In light of the results we emphasize the processing of musical syntax as a context factor suggesting a paradigm of time-syntax-congruency in music perception. This presumes that the processing of time and rhythm goes hand in hand in a mutual dependency and that other areas of the brain involved in the processing of musical syntax (Brodman Areal 6, 22 and 44) may be recruited and therefore compensate impaired BG circuits responsible for time processing and rhythm perception. Furthermore top-down-bottom-up-processes could also interfere and interact in this context of compensation. The deficits in longer time intervals in patients with progressive disease are most likely due to fluctuations in concentration and memory which have already been described in former studies. Additionally, musically trained persons seem to have a peculiarly higher resolution in detecting deviations in time and syntactic structures of music in comparison to persons with no formal training.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/perception-of-time-in-music-in-parkinsons-disease-processing-of-musical-syntax-compensates-rhythmic-deficits/