Abstract
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.
Highlights
Music has the capacity to induce movements in humans (Lesaffre et al, 2008; Keller and Rieger, 2009)
Leman (2007, p. 96) suggests, “Spontaneous movements [to music] may be closely related to predictions of local bursts of energy in the musical audio stream, in particular to the beat and the rhythm patterns.”. Such bodily entrainment to music is the topic of the present paper, in particular how humans embody periodicities in music, which musical characteristics facilitate periodic movement, and what kind of phase relationships exist between movements and musical beat locations
The first one deals with period locking to different metrical levels in full-body movement and its relations to beat- and rhythm-related musical characteristics to address the shortage of research related to periodicity in music-induced movement
Summary
Music has the capacity to induce movements in humans (Lesaffre et al, 2008; Keller and Rieger, 2009) Such movement responses during music listening are usually spontaneous and can range from tapping along with the music to full-body dance movements. 96) suggests, “Spontaneous movements [to music] may be closely related to predictions of local bursts of energy in the musical audio stream, in particular to the beat and the rhythm patterns.”. Such bodily entrainment to music is the topic of the present paper, in particular how humans embody periodicities in music, which musical characteristics facilitate periodic movement, and what kind of phase relationships exist between movements and musical beat locations. Entrainment to rhythmic music has been found in vocal learning nonhuman species, such as the cockatoo Snowball (Patel et al, 2008)
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