Tapping to drumbeats in an online experiment changes our perception of time and expressiveness

Abstract

Bodily movements along with music, such as tapping, are not only very frequent, but may also have a profound impact on our perception of time and emotions. The current study adopted an online tapping paradigm to investigate participants’ time experiences and expressiveness judgements when they tapped and did not tap to a series of drumming performances that varied in tempo and rhythmic complexity. Participants were asked to judge durations, passage of time (PoT), and the expressiveness of the performances in two conditions: (1) Observing only, (2) Observing and tapping regularly to the perceived beats. Results show that tapping trials passed subjectively faster and were partially (in slow- and medium-tempo conditions) perceived shorter compared to the observing-only trials. Increases in musical tempo (in tapping trials) and in complexity led to faster PoT, potentially due to distracted attentional resources for the timing task. Participants’ musical training modulated the effects of complexity on the judgments of expressiveness. In addition, increases in tapping speed led to duration overestimation among the less musically trained participants. Taken together, tapping to music may have altered the internal clock speed, affecting the temporal units accumulated in the pacemaker-counter model.