Finger-to-Beat Coordination Skill of Non-dancers, Street Dancers, and the World Champion of a Street-Dance Competition

Abstract

The coordination of body movements to a musical beat is a common feature of many dance styles. However, the auditory–motor coordination skills of dancers remain largely uninvestigated. The purpose of this study was to examine the auditory–motor coordination skills of non-dancers, street dancers, and the winner of a celebrated international street dance competition, while coordinating their rhythmic finger movements to a beat. The beat rate of a metronome increased from 1.0 to 3.7 Hz. The participants were asked to either flex or extend their index fingers on the beat in each condition. Under the extend-on-the-beat condition, both the dancers and non-dancers showed a spontaneous transition from the extend-on-the-beat to the flex-on-the-beat or to a phase wandering pattern. However, the critical frequency at which the transition occurred was significantly higher in the dancers (3.3 Hz) than in the non-dancers (2.6 Hz). Under the flex-on-the-beat condition, the dancers were able to maintain their coordination pattern more stably at high beat rates compared to the non-dancers. Furthermore, the world champion matched the timing of movement peak velocity to the beat across the different beat rates. This may give a sense of unity between the movement and the beat for the audience because the peak velocity of the rhythmic movement works as a temporal cue for the audiovisual synchrony perception. These results suggest that the skills of accomplished dancers lie in their small finger movements and that the sensorimotor learning of street dance is characterized by a stabilization of the coordination patterns, including the inhibition of an unintentional transition to other coordination patterns.

“It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got that Swing”– an Alternative Concept for Understanding the Evolution of Dance and Music in Human Beings

“…Human infants spontaneously engage in significantly more rhythmic movement to music and other rhythmically regular sounds than to language ( Zentner and Eerola, 2010 ). The precocity of beat induction already being observed in newborns, the ability to stratify musical beats into tactus and meters, the efficacy of rocking, the unintentional movements to rhythm, the pre-attentive characteristic of beat processing, and the intensity of the emotional impact of R&D on humans, support our view that in human evolution communication through R&D preceded verbal and melodic communication ( Bergeson and Trehub, 2005 ; Winkler et al, 2009 ; Hagen et al, 2010 ; Whitehead, 2010 ; Nozaradan et al, 2011a , b , 2012 ; Honing, 2012 ; Lesaffre and Leman, 2013 ; van Noorden, 2013 ; Bouwer et al, 2014 ; Leman and Maes, 2014 ; Morley, 2014 ; Ravignani et al, 2014 ; Miura et al, 2016 ). Not only environmental but also genetic factors have been shown to play a role in our ability to perceive rhythm ( Seesjärvi et al, 2015 ).…”

Effects of Exercise Program on Coordination and Explosive Power in University Dance Students

“…In order to perform this, dancers must have a developed sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) which represents the coordination of rhythmic movements with an external rhythm or beat (Repp, 2005). Dance training facilitates SMS (Karpati, Giacosa, Foster, Penhune, & Hyde, 2016) and allows dancers to have more accurate and stable SMS than non-dancers (Jin et al, 2019), which is particularly expressed in Street Dancing (Miura, Fujii, Okano, Kudo, & Nakazawa, 2016). The specific technique and movement structures of modern dances imply a large number of rapid changes of direction and weight transfer, harmonization of movements to the rhythm of music, and coordination of movements with other dancers on the dance floor.…”

Dance on the Brain: Enhancing Intra- and Inter-Brain Synchrony

“…This rhythmic ability emerges early in life, with infants showing the ability to move in sync to musical rhythms (Phillips-Silver et al, 2010 ). Through dance training, these abilities are enhanced, with dancers being able to entrain more effectively than non-dancers to both musical rhythms as well as the body movements of other individuals (Washburn et al, 2014 ; Miura et al, 2015 , 2016 ; Jin et al, 2019 ).…”