"[6] Josh McDermott, head of MIT's Laboratory for Computational Audition, found Patel's focus on the syntax of music and language with its potential for revelations into similarities in their underlying mechanical operations especially significant.
[6] In college, he concentrated mostly on cell biology until his senior year, when his interest was ignited by courses in animal behavior and evolution, and he thought he might study music as a biologist.
[10] In 2005, he was appointed the Esther J. Burnham Senior Fellow, and he remained at the Institute until 2012 when he joined Tufts University as an associate professor in the Department of Psychology.
At Tufts, he is a participating member of the Stibel Dennett Consortium, a faculty group that encourages teaching initiatives and scholarship relating to the brain and cognition.
[13] He was named a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies (Social Sciences) for 2018-2019[14][13] and was a visiting scholar in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
He remains focused on the areas outlined in Music, Language, and the Brain: sound elements: pitch and timbre; rhythm; syntax; meaning; and evolution.
His work takes advantage of advances in neuroscience that enable the mapping of parallel processing of brain activity in music and language applications.
Patel's OPERA hypothesis suggests that adaptive plasticity for specific neural areas beneficial to speech processing can be derived from musical training when five conditions are met: O - Overlap; P - Precision; E - Emotion; R - Repetition; and A - Attention.
A drop-down effect is suggested from the greater precision demanded by musical training to the language acquisition areas shared by the neural networks.
[25][26][27] After failing to find anticipated rhythmic correlational correspondences in chimpanzees, Patel was surprised to learn about Snowball, a cockatoo with a fine sense of rhythm.
After establishing stylistic contrasts in stress patterns in French and English spoken language, he applies the formula to musical compositions by native composers of both countries.