Abstract
Musical meters vary considerably across cultures, yet relatively little is known about how culture-specific experience influences metrical processing. In Experiment 1, we compared American and Indian listeners' synchronous tapping to slow sequences. Inter-tone intervals contained silence or to-be-ignored rhythms that were designed to induce a simple meter (familiar to Americans and Indians) or a complex meter (familiar only to Indians). A subset of trials contained an abrupt switch from one rhythm to another to assess the disruptive effects of contradicting the initially implied meter. In the unfilled condition, both groups tapped earlier than the target and showed large tap-tone asynchronies (measured in relative phase). When inter-tone intervals were filled with simple-meter rhythms, American listeners tapped later than targets, but their asynchronies were smaller and declined more rapidly. Likewise, asynchronies rose sharply following a switch away from simple-meter but not from complex-meter rhythm. By contrast, Indian listeners performed similarly across all rhythm types, with asynchronies rapidly declining over the course of complex- and simple-meter trials. For these listeners, a switch from either simple or complex meter increased asynchronies. Experiment 2 tested American listeners but doubled the duration of the synchronization phase prior to (and after) the switch. Here, compared with simple meters, complex-meter rhythms elicited larger asynchronies that declined at a slower rate, however, asynchronies increased after the switch for all conditions. Our results provide evidence that ease of meter processing depends to a great extent on the amount of experience with specific meters.
Highlights
We are continually confronted with sensory input that must be interpreted before meaningful interaction with the world can occur
Whereas Indian participants readily synchronized to simple- and complexmeter trials, Americans, whose experience was almost exclusively limited to simple meters, were better at and faster to synchronize during simple- than complex-meter trials
It is noteworthy that American listeners did show a decline in relative phase during unfamiliar complexmeter trials, even though stabilization took longer for complex than for simple meter trials
Summary
We are continually confronted with sensory input that must be interpreted before meaningful interaction with the world can occur. People adapt flexibly to environmental contexts by drawing on prior experiences to efficiently encode and respond appropriately to novel experiences or stimuli. Specific experiences that vary across cultures may lead individuals to perceive and respond to novel stimuli in culture-specific ways [1,2]. It is easier to detect mistuned notes within the context of a familiar than foreign musical scale [8,9]. The present work provides novel evidence that everyday musical behaviors such as listening and dancing to music in a specific cultural context (India versus the United States) can give rise to robust cross-cultural differences in perception and production of temporal information among adult listeners
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