Active Drumming Experience Increases Infants’ Sensitivity to Audiovisual Synchrony during Observed Drumming Actions

Abstract

In the current study, we examined the role of active experience on sensitivity to multisensory synchrony in six-month-old infants in a musical context. In the first of two experiments, we trained infants to produce a novel multimodal effect (i.e., a drum beat) and assessed the effects of this training, relative to no training, on their later perception of the synchrony between audio and visual presentation of the drumming action. In a second experiment, we then contrasted this active experience with the observation of drumming in order to test whether observation of the audiovisual effect was as effective for sensitivity to multimodal synchrony as active experience. Our results indicated that active experience provided a unique benefit above and beyond observational experience, providing insights on the embodied roots of (early) music perception and cognition.

Babies know bad dancing when they see it: Older but not younger infants discriminate between synchronous and asynchronous audiovisual musical displays

“…Yet, despite a rich literature on development of audiovisual speech perception, relatively little work has explored the development of audiovisual music perception. While prior work has shown that infants perceive audiovisual synchrony in very simple displays in which individual, temporally distinct sounds correspond precisely to individual visual trajectory reversals or impact events (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000;Gerson et al, 2015;Kopp, 2014), the present experiments show that by the end of the first year infants succeed in a much more complex intermodal synchrony perception task. In order to succeed in this task, the subject must infer a musical beat from sound information and match it to seen movement patterns, parsing and comparing many potential points of synchrony between the complex movements of a dancer and the multi-layered event structure in real music (Burger et al, , 2014Naveda & Lehman, 2010;Toiviainen et al, 2010;Su, 2016).…”

“…Exposure to specific dances (such as Charleston or Samba) may also determine whether or not adults can accurately perceive audiovisual synchrony in displays of those dances (Naveda & Leman, 2010). Recent evidence suggests that 6-month-olds who had just 5 minutes of experience attempting to play a drum outperformed 6-month-old controls without such experience on a simple audiovisual synchrony matching task (Gerson et al, 2015). Future work is needed to investigate whether or not individual differences in experience with drumming, dancing and perhaps even walking and crawling predict how well infants perceive musical audiovisual synchrony.…”

Motor and Audiovisual Learning Consolidate Auditory Memory of Tonally Ambiguous Melodies

“…These results are compatible with the ''embodied'' perspective we briefly discussed, and may inspire a deeper understanding of what music learning entails. We maintain that experiencing and learning music can be seen as processes fundamentally immersed in the dynamics of action (Gerson, Schiavio, Timmers, & Hunnius, 2015;Krueger, 2011;Leman, 2007;Menin & Schiavio, 2012;Schiavio, 2014b;Schiavio & Høffding, 2015),, and not reducible to acquisition, elaboration, and development of complex mental representations fully realizable in the head (see Gruhn, 2006). We argue that this perspective downplays the role of action for musical experience, and creates a separation between inner processing and outer behavioral events.…”

Exploratory expertise and the dual intentionality of music-making

“…On this view, each teleomusical act strengthens a sense of skilled agency -a sense of being a situated creature whose relationships with objects and their sonic opportunities are meaningful. Moreover, we know that these kind of motor actions facilitate the development of the ability to predict the goals of another's actions (see Kanakogi and Itakura 2011) and the understanding of audiovisual synchrony (Gerson et al 2015) -two important elements of a richer mental exploratory expertise. Finally, as mentioned, teleomusical acts are often facilitated and encouraged by a caregiver.…”