In everyday situations, like a rock party or an organ concert, we feel music vibrating through our bodies. How do these vibrotactile signals influence music processing? How do they aid auditory scene analysis? Combining psychophysics, fMRI and time-resolved EEG decoding, this work reveals how the brain encodes the temporal structure of music (beat and envelope) across audition and touch and uses this information to guide multisensory integration and segregation in simple and more complex perceptual scenes. Participants experienced monophonic and polyphonic piano pieces through auditory, vibrotactile and audiotactile stimulation. Vibrotactile signals improved the detection of a brief target embedded in music, establishing the functional relevance of audiotactile integration in naturalistic settings. fMRI and EEG multivariate decoding revealed that auditory and tactile beat information converged in planum temporale and parietal operculum, albeit through distinct neural dynamics and representations. Superior temporal cortices reliably encoded envelope information from audition, but only weakly from touch. Nevertheless, vibrotactile signals significantly enhanced neural encoding of auditory beat as early as 100 ms, and envelope representations from 250 ms onward. These encoding benefits were associated with superadditive interactions in primary auditory cortex, where tactile signals sharpen and amplify auditory envelope representations. In complex polyphonic music, touch further amplified the segregation and encoding of temporally coherent auditory streams. Our findings highlight the important, yet largely unexplored influence of touch on auditory processing, enriching music perception and supporting auditory scene analysis in real-world environments. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, 309349, 101096659

Skin temperature and the ability to perceive warm and cold thermal stimuli (i.e., thermoception) are fundamental to human survival, influencing both our evolutionary history and early individual development. Interestingly, recent research has also started to uncover the role of these thermosensory signals in cognition. Such signals may contribute to the construction of our bodily self-awareness, and specifically the sense of body ownership, which is defined as the feeling that the body and its parts belong to us. This review examines how thermosensory signals travel from the skin to the brain and their impact on body ownership in both healthy and clinical populations. Furthermore, we propose mechanisms that may underlie this interaction and highlight potential clinical and societal applications.

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Abstract. Blindness has been shown to induce changes in the structural and functional organization of the brain. However, few studies have investigated the

Intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) is a technique to provide tactile sensations for a somatosensory brain-machine interface (BMI). A viable BMI must function within the rich, multisensory environme...

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Perceptual experience depends on recurrent interactions between lower and higher cortices. One theory, predictive coding, posits that feedback from higher to lower brain regions decreases neuronal activity predicted by higher-level representations. Despite the widespread adoption of predictive coding in neuroscience, the correspondence to neurophysiological findings in sensory cortices remains elusive. Here, we review how the canonical patterns of intra- and inter-cortical interactions that occur during perception and shifts of attention deviate from those predicted by predictive coding. We argue that these circuit interactions are better captured by alternative theories, which we summarize under the umbrella term BELIEF. We review how BELIEF theories account for the inter-areal interactions during attentive perception.