Don’t forget the lyrics! Spatiotemporal dynamics of neural mechanisms spontaneously evoked by gaps of silence in familiar and newly learned songs

•Musical imagery triggers neural dynamics leading to the completion of missing lyrics.•Silence gaps inserted into songs spontaneously elicit a series of neural responses.•Familiarity and learning effects emerge as early as 100 ms after silence occurs.•Imagining lyrics in familiar and passively learnt songs shares similar mechanisms.

The vast majority of people experience musical imagery, the sensation of reliving a song in absence of any external stimulation. Internal perception of a song can be deliberate and effortful, but also may occur involuntarily and spontaneously. Moreover, musical imagery is also involuntarily used for automatically completing missing parts of music or lyrics from a familiar song. The aim of our study was to explore the onset of musical imagery dynamics that leads to the automatic completion of missing lyrics. High-density electroencephalography was used to record the cerebral activity of twenty healthy volunteers while they were passively listening to unfamiliar songs, very familiar songs, and songs previously listened to for two weeks. Silent gaps inserted into these songs elicited a series of neural activations encompassing perceptual, attentional and cognitive mechanisms (range 100–500 ms). Familiarity and learning effects emerged as early as 100 ms and lasted 400 ms after silence occurred. Although participants reported more easily mentally imagining lyrics in familiar rather than passively learnt songs, the onset of neural mechanisms and the power spectrum underlying musical imagery were similar for both types of songs. This study offers new insights into the musical imagery dynamics evoked by gaps of silence and on the role of familiarity and learning processes in the generation of these dynamics. The automatic and effortless method presented here is a potentially useful tool to understand failure in the familiarity and learning processes of pathological populations.