'MUSIC IS THE BEST MEANS WE HAVE OF DIGESTING TIME': A STUDY OF TEMPORAL PERCEPTION 'MUSIC IS THE BEST MEANS WE HAVE OF DIGESTING TIME': A STUDY OF TEMPORAL (original) (raw)
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Pulse and Entrainment to Non-Isochronous Auditory Stimuli: The Case of North Indian Alap
Pulse is often understood as a feature of a (quasi-) isochronous event sequence that is picked up by an entrained subject. However, entrainment does not only occur between quasiperiodic rhythms. This paper demonstrates the expression of pulse by subjects listening to non-periodic musical stimuli and investigates the processes behind this behaviour. The stimuli are extracts from the introductory sections of North Indian (Hindustani) classical music performances (alap, jor and jhala). The first of three experiments demonstrates regular motor responses to both irregular alap and more regular jor sections: responses to alap appear related to individual spontaneous tempi, while for jor they relate to the stimulus event rate. A second experiment investigated whether subjects respond to average periodicities of the alap section, and whether their responses show phase alignment to the musical events. In the third experiment we investigated responses to a broader sample of performances, testing their relationship to spontaneous tempo, and the effect of prior experience with this music. Our results suggest an entrainment model in which pulse is understood as the experience of one's internal periodicity: it is not necessarily linked to temporally regular, structured sensory input streams; it can arise spontaneously through the performance of repetitive motor actions, or on exposure to event sequences with rather irregular temporal structures. Greater regularity in the external event sequence leads to entrainment between motor responses and stimulus sequence, modifying subjects' internal periodicities in such a way that they are either identical or harmonically related to each other. This can be considered as the basis for shared (rhythmic) experience and may be an important process supporting 'social' effects of temporally regular music.
Temporal and Structural Perception of Rhythmic Irregularities
2018
, 54 pages Time perception studies often seek for a timing mechanism that can explain temporal judgments in a general way. In search of such a model, environmental, contextual and subjective factors affecting temporal judgments should be taken into account as well. The present study provides a critical evolution of existing timing models by comparing the interval processing and production strategies of musicians and non-musicians. The study contains 2 experiments: Experiment 1 is a perceptual comparison task and Experiment 2 is a rhythm reproduction task. The contrasts between the two groups are believed to be captured by participants' initial reactions to rhythmic structures. For that purpose, short scale (4 beat) rhythmic samples are used in the experiments. Standard samples are regular 4 beat rhythms. Test samples include regular and irregular rhythms. The irregular conditions are prepared by changing the temporal position of the second beat of the regular rhythms. Early and late second beats in these irregular samples have the same temporal distance from the expected beat. Hence, the expectancy violation reflects any differences between early and late oddball stimuli. The experimental analyses suggest an asymmetry between early and late oddballs in participants' initial reactions to such expectancy violations, in terms of their perceptual comparison of rhythms, as well as their duration and rhythm (re)production. Moreover, it provides evidence for different memory procedures and encoding strategies used by participant groups in order to cope with rhythmic irregularities.
Dynamic interactions between musical, cardiovascular, and cerebral rhythms in humans
Circulation, 2009
BACKGROUND: Reactions to music are considered subjective, but previous studies suggested that cardiorespiratory variables increase with faster tempo independent of individual preference. We tested whether compositions characterized by variable emphasis could produce parallel instantaneous cardiovascular/respiratory responses and whether these changes mirrored music profiles. METHODS AND RESULTS: Twenty-four young healthy subjects, 12 musicians (choristers) and 12 nonmusician control subjects, listened (in random order) to music with vocal (Puccini's "Turandot") or orchestral (Beethoven's 9th Symphony adagio) progressive crescendos, more uniform emphasis (Bach cantata), 10-second period (ie, similar to Mayer waves) rhythmic phrases (Giuseppe Verdi's arias "Va pensiero" and "Libiam nei lieti calici"), or silence while heart rate, respiration, blood pressures, middle cerebral artery flow velocity, and skin vasomotion were recorded.Common responses were recognized by averaging instantaneous cardiorespiratory responses regressed against changes in music profiles and by coherence analysis during rhythmic phrases. Vocal and orchestral crescendos produced significant (P=0.05 or better) correlations between cardiovascular or respiratory signals and music profile, particularly skin vasoconstriction and blood pressures, proportional to crescendo, in contrast to uniform emphasis, which induced skin vasodilation and reduction in blood pressures. Correlations were significant both in individual and group-averaged signals. Phrases at 10-second periods by Verdi entrained the cardiovascular autonomic variables. No qualitative differences in recorded measurements were seen between musicians and nonmusicians. CONCLUSIONS: Music emphasis and rhythmic phrases are tracked consistently by physiological variables. Autonomic responses are synchronized with music, which might therefore convey emotions through autonomic arousal during crescendos or rhythmic phrases.
Subdividing the beat: Auditory and motor contributions to synchronization
Music Perception, 2009
kinematic information influenced pianists' ability to synchronize musical sequences with a metronome. Pianists performed melodies in which quarter-note beats were subdivided by intervening eighth notes that resulted from auditory information (heard tones), motor production (produced tones), both, or neither. Temporal accuracy of performance was compared with finger trajectories recorded with motion capture. Asynchronies were larger when motor or auditory sensory information occurred between beats; auditory information yielded the largest asynchronies. Pianists were sensitive to the timing of the sensory information; information that occurred earlier relative to the midpoint between metronome beats was associated with larger asynchronies on the following beat. Finger motion was influenced only by motor production between beats and indicated the influence of other fingers' motion. These findings demonstrate that synchronization accuracy in music performance is influenced by both the timing and modality of sensory information that occurs between beats. FIGURE 3. Mean asynchronies (±SE) by beat within the odd-and evensubdivision melodies for auditory (top panel), motor (middle panel), and auditory + motor (bottom panel) information. Stars indicate beats for which asynchronies differed significantly between melodies (p < .05).
The Journal of Neuroscience, 2009
Little is known about the underlying neurobiology of rhythm and beat perception, despite its universal cultural importance. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study rhythm perception in musicians and nonmusicians. Three conditions varied in the degree to which external reinforcement versus internal generation of the beat was required. The "volume" condition strongly externally marked the beat with volume changes, the "duration" condition marked the beat with weaker accents arising from duration changes, and the "unaccented" condition required the beat to be entirely internally generated. In all conditions, beat rhythms compared with nonbeat control rhythms revealed putamen activity. The presence of a beat was also associated with greater connectivity between the putamen and the supplementary motor area (SMA), the premotor cortex (PMC), and auditory cortex. In contrast, the type of accent within the beat conditions modulated the coupling between premotor and auditory cortex, with greater modulation for musicians than nonmusicians. Importantly, the response of the putamen to beat conditions was not attributable to differences in temporal complexity between the three rhythm conditions. We propose that a cortico-subcortical network including the putamen, SMA, and PMC is engaged for the analysis of temporal sequences and prediction or generation of putative beats, especially under conditions that may require internal generation of the beat. The importance of this system for auditory-motor interaction and development of precisely timed movement is suggested here by its facilitation in musicians.
Hunting for the beat in the body: on period and phase locking in music-induced movement
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2014
Music has the capacity to induce movement in humans. Such responses during music listening are usually spontaneous and range from tapping to full-body dancing. However, it is still unclear how humans embody musical structures to facilitate entrainment. This paper describes two experiments, one dealing with period locking to different metrical levels in full-body movement and its relationships to beat-and rhythm-related musical characteristics, and the other dealing with phase locking in the more constrained condition of sideways swaying motions. Expected in Experiment 1 was that music with clear and strong beat structures would facilitate more period-locked movement. Experiment 2 was assumed to yield a common phase relationship between participants' swaying movements and the musical beat. In both experiments optical motion capture was used to record participants' movements. In Experiment 1 a window-based period-locking probability index related to four metrical levels was established, based on acceleration data in three dimensions. Subsequent correlations between this index and musical characteristics of the stimuli revealed pulse clarity to be related to periodic movement at the tactus level, and low frequency flux to mediolateral and anteroposterior movement at both tactus and bar levels. At faster tempi higher metrical levels became more apparent in participants' movement. Experiment 2 showed that about half of the participants showed a stable phase relationship between movement and beat, with superior-inferior movement most often being synchronized to the tactus level, whereas mediolateral movement was rather synchronized to the bar level. However, the relationship between movement phase and beat locations was not consistent between participants, as the beat locations occurred at different phase angles of their movements. The results imply that entrainment to music is a complex phenomenon, involving the whole body and occurring at different metrical levels.
BRIEF REPORT “Moving to the beat ” improves timing perception
2013
Here, we demonstrate that “moving to the beat ” can improve the perception of timing, providing an intriguing explanation as to why we often move when listening to music. In the first experiment, participants heard a series of isochro-nous beats and identified whether the timing of a final tone after a short silence was consistent with the timing of the preceding sequence. On half of the trials, participants tapped along with the beat, and on half of the trials, they listened without moving. When the final tone occurred later than expected, performance in the movement condition was signif-icantly better than performance in the no-movement condition. Two additional experiments illustrate that this improved per-formance is due to improved timekeeping, rather than to a shift in strategy. This work contributes to a growing literature on sensorimotor integration by demonstrating body movement’s objective improvement in timekeeping, complementing previ-ous explorations involving subjectiv...
Perception and Production of Syncopated Rhythms
Music Perception, 2007
The cognitive strategies by which humans process complex, metrically-ambiguous rhythmic patterns remain poorly understood. We investigated listeners' abilities to perceive, process and produce complex, syncopated rhythmic patterns played against a regular sequence of pulses.
cas.uchicago.edu
People often coordinate their actions with sequences that exhibit temporal variability and unfold at multiple periodicities. We compared oscillator-and timekeeper-based accounts of temporal coordination by examining musicians' coordination of rhythmic musical sequences with a metronome that gradually changed rate at the end of a musical phrase (Experiment 1) or at the beginning of a phrase (Experiment 2). The rhythms contained events that occurred at the same periodic rate as the metronome and at half the period. Rate change consisted of a linear increase or decrease in intervals between metronome onsets. Musicians coordinated their performances better with a metronome that decreased than increased in tempo (as predicted by an oscillator model), at both beginnings and ends of musical phrases. Model performance was tested with an oscillator period or timekeeper interval set to the same period as the metronome (1:1 coordination) or half the metronome period (2:1 coordination). Only the oscillator model was able to predict musicians' coordination at both periods. These findings suggest that coordination is based on internal neural oscillations that entrain to external sequences.
Temporal stability in repeated listening tasks
2006
Empirical research on stability of temporal judgments in music has increased considerably during recent decades. The context of this paper is the question whether a piece of music has one and only one 'right' tempo, and if so, whether this seemingly well-established concept possesses an absolute or right time framework in the mind of the listeners. This paper will review the literature on (a) the nature of timing in music from a biological perspective, (b) stability of motor and perceptual tasks during music performance, (c) personal or preferred tempo judgments, and (d) stability of tempo judgments in music listening. More specifically, the paper will focus on the use of internal clock-based mechanisms to represent musical timing and tempo in repeated musical tasks that may help us advance our understanding of the activity of the human body and consciousness in terms of what they reveal about motor programs and precise tempo preferences involved in the musical experience. Thereby, the theoretical framework of the Lapidaki (2000) study and the discussion of findings will be will be expanded and discussed in a new light. Finally, I will propose that large-scale timing in music appears to reflect forms of "implicit cognition," a term that has been used in psychological research to characterize situations in which mental processes can influence perception outside of phenomenal awareness and voluntary control. The material of this paper may prove useful in integrating a range of data and stimulating new research about the temporal organization of nervous system interactions and internal clocks with regard to tempo judgments in a complex nonverbal auditory domain.