Collective dynamics support group drumming, reduce variability, and stabilize tempo drift

Abstract

Humans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Human social interaction has largely been addressed in dyadic paradigms and it is yet to be determined whether the ensuing conclusions generalize to larger groups. Studied more extensively in nonhuman animal behaviour, the presence of multiple agents engaged in the same task space creates different constraints and possibilities than in simpler dyadic interactions. We addressed whether collective dynamics play a role in human circle drumming. The task was to synchronize in a group with an initial reference pattern and then maintain synchronization after it was muted. We varied the number of drummers, from solo to dyad, quartet, and octet. The observed lower variability, lack of speeding up, smoother individual dynamics, and leader-less inter-personal coordination indicated that stability increased as group size increased, a sort of temporal wisdom of crowds. We propose a hybrid continuous-discrete Kuramoto model for emergent group synchronization with pulse-based coupling that exhibits a mean field positive feedback loop. This research suggests that collective phenomena are among the factors that play a role in social cognition.

Multiscale Approaches to Music and the Embodied Brain

“…have not yet been made explicit. We might look to recent exciting work that has shown a progression in this direction; the likes of [88,94,95] investigate musical contexts spanning individual performances and collective ensembles, alongside their neuroscientific underpinnings, in how musical environments are brought about and shared. We hold that a scaling law framing, similar to ones sketched above offers a promising path forward in addressing some of these future questions in the multiscale interactions of music cognition.…”

Local and global rhythmic dynamics in small-group conversations

“…Only a limited number of studies have explored this relationship, and their primary focus has been on the global dynamics of synchronization. These studies have demonstrated in laboratory conditions that stable synchronization between participants occurs in cases of both complete connectivity and centralized networks (Alderisio et al, 2017;Bardy et al, 2020;Dotov et al, 2022;Van De Rijt, 2018). Our results further contribute to this understanding by showing that natural conversations characterized by less dense and more centralized communicative networks (1C, 1A) result in more structured collective rhythms.…”

“…The structure of this web of rhythmic interactions can, in turn, in uence group coordination or even lead to global dynamics and properties that are qualitatively different from the individual rhythmic behaviors involved. For example, a connectivity pattern in which everyone interacts with everyone or in which someone leads the interaction can improve and produce more stable group coordination than other connectivity patterns (Alderisio et al, 2017; Bardy et al, 2020;Dotov et al, 2022;Van De Rijt, 2018). In addition, group-level dynamics such as synchronization (simultaneous patterns) and alternation (sequential patterns) can spontaneously arise from the pattern of rhythmic interactions (Green eld et al, 2021; Ravignani et al, 2014).…”

Social and nonlinear dynamics unite: Musical group synchrony

“…Some studies have applied Granger causality measures to pairwise comparisons of quartet members [8,31] to draw inferences about the relative similarity among and contributions of different members in establishing synchrony. Especially promising are studies that directly measure interactions among group members while forming larger and larger groups, to compare synchrony measurements across group sizes [32][33][34]. Additional studies have examined pairwise comparisons of each ensemble member against an automatically identified metrical grid [35], an approach that relies on a stationary musical meter.…”

“…Pairwise Granger causality measures have also been applied to body movements [6,10,36] among performing musicians, with an assumption that movements are related to the group's timing [8]. Entropy (an information-processing measure of causal information flow between group members) and phase synchronization measures (discussed next) are also promising [32,33,37] as they can be sensitive to group size; neither has been implemented yet for group roles in larger musical ensembles (see [38] for a social application).…”