Perception of Musical Rhythm Relies on Auditory, Motor and Vestibular Sensory Systems

Jessica Phillips-Silver, McMaster University Department of Psychology

Abstract
In music we hear melody, but we feel the beat. We report the first studies to investigate multisensory interactions between auditory and motor systems that are critical to rhythm perception in music. Phillips-Silver and Trainor (under review) showed that movement of the body influences the auditory encoding of an ambiguous rhythm pattern in infants. Concurrent movement and listening experienced by infants determined whether they interpreted the pattern as a march (3 groups of two beats) or as a waltz (2 groups of 3 beats). Here we show similar effects in adults who bounced by holding hands and bending their knees in synchrony with an experimenter. Adults who bounced on every second beat chose as familiar an auditory version of the rhythm pattern that had strong auditory accents on every second beat (march), while those who bounced on every third beat chose a version with accents on every third beat (waltz). In subsequent experiments we demonstrated (1) that this effect does not rely on visual information, and (2) that movement of the subject’s own body is in fact critical to the effect. We discuss the implications of these findings for the role of vestibular and motor systems in musical rhythm perception.

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