Abstract
Musical interaction is a unique model for understanding humans’ ability to align goals, intentions, and actions, which also allows for the manipulation of participants’ internal predictive models of upcoming events. Here we used polyrhythms to construct two joint finger tapping tasks that even when rhythmically dissimilar resulted in equal inter-tap intervals (ITIs). Thus, behaviourally a dyad of two musicians tap isochronously at the same rate, yet with their own distinct rhythmical context model (RCM). We recruited 22 highly skilled musicians (in 11 dyads) and contrasted the effect of having a shared versus non-shared RCM on dyads’ synchronization behaviour. As expected, tapping synchronization was significantly worse at the start of trials with non-shared models compared to trials with a shared model. However, the musicians were able to quickly recover when holding dissimilar predictive models. We characterised the directionality in the tapping behaviour of the dyads and found patterns mostly of mutual adaptation. Yet, in a subset of dyads primarily consisting of drummers, we found significantly different synchronization patterns, suggesting that instrument expertise can significantly affect synchronization strategies. Overall, this demonstrates that holding different predictive models impacts synchronization in musicians performing joint finger tapping.
Highlights
Successful interpersonal interaction and communication is dependent on shared predictive models[1,2,3,4]
A likelihood ratio test revealed a significant effect of condition on synchronization in the bidirectional scenario (χ2 (2) = 13.03, p = 0.0015)
We found that the synchronization indices (SI) was significantly lowered by approximately −0.023 (p = 0.0016) in condition B compared to condition A, and by approximately −0.021 (p = 0.0123) in condition A + B compared to A
Summary
Successful interpersonal interaction and communication is dependent on shared predictive models[1,2,3,4]. Interpersonal coordination may be a human predisposition, evident in behaviours such as the tendency towards synchronised walking[8], or how dyads in rocking chairs attempt to synchronize even when the natural frequencies of their chairs are incongruent[9]. This tendency to synchronize movements is visible in body movement in more complex interactions, such as the bodily synchronization during joke telling[10]. In music, interpersonal coordination is a result of intended joint action rather than a spontaneous occurrence or basal mimicry. Joint action may best be understood within a predictive coding framework[6,16,17,18,19]
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