Sounds familiar(?): Expertise with specific musical genres modulates timing perception and micro-level synchronization to auditory stimuli

Danielsen, Anne; Nymoen, Kristian; Langerød, Martin Torvik; Jacobsen, Eirik; Johansson, Mats; London, Justin

doi:10.3758/s13414-021-02393-z

Cited by 13 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…But our participants had relatively low levels of musical sophistication (measured by the Gold-MSI index, Müllensiefen et al, 2014), and several perceptual studies have reported more precise perception of timing deviations for musicians (e.g. Jones and Yee, 1997;Matthews et al, 2016;Repp, 2010) alongside perceptual centres dependent on genre-specific musical experience (Danielsen et al, 2021). Experience effects might also depend on more-naturalistic microtiming patterns, requiring more detailed probabilistic descriptions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Probabilistic modelling of microtiming perception

Kaplan¹,

Jamone²,

Pearce³

2022

Preprint

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Music performances are rich in systematic temporal irregularities called "microtiming", too fine-grained to be notated in a musical score but important for musical expression and communication. Several studies have examined listeners' preference for rhythms varying in microtiming, but few have addressed precisely how microtiming is perceived, especially in terms of cognitive mechanisms, making the empirical evidence difficult to interpret. Here we provide evidence that microtiming perception can be simulated as a process of probabilistic prediction. Participants performed an XAB discrimination test, in which an archetypal popular drum rhythm was presented with different microtiming. The results indicate that listeners could implicitly discriminate the mean and variance of stimulus microtiming. Furthermore, their responses were effectively simulated by a Bayesian model of entrainment, using a distance function derived from its dynamic posterior estimate over phase. Wide individual differences in participant sensitivity to microtiming were predicted by a model parameter likened to noisy timekeeping processes in the brain. Overall, this suggests that the cognitive mechanisms underlying perception of microtiming reflect a continuous inferential process, potentially driving qualitative judgements of rhythmic feel.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Probabilistic modelling of microtiming perception

Kaplan¹,

Jamone²,

Pearce³

2022

Preprint

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“…Moreover, the CA-BAT measures the ability to detect fine-grained phase offsets and this is often not necessary for many instruments in a variety of musical traditions. Indeed, the perceptual center (when a sound’s onset is perceived) has been shown to vary considerably depending on a number of musical qualities ( Danielsen et al, 2019 ), how it is measured ( London et al, 2019 ), and genre expertise ( Danielsen et al, 2022 ). It is possible that only highly trained musicians develop an enhanced beat perception ability that generalizes across sounds well enough to be observed in the beat alignment measured by the CA-BAT.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beat alignment ability is associated with formal musical training not current music playing

et al. 2023

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The ability to perceive the beat in music is crucial for both music listeners and players with expert musicians being notably skilled at noticing fine deviations in the beat. However, it is unclear whether this beat perception ability is enhanced in trained musicians who continue to practice relative to musicians who no longer play. Thus, we investigated this by comparing active musicians’, inactive musicians’, and nonmusicians’ beat alignment ability scores on the Computerized Adaptive Beat Alignment Test (CA-BAT). 97 adults with diverse musical experience participated in the study, reporting their years of formal musical training, number of instruments played, hours of weekly music playing, and hours of weekly music listening, in addition to their demographic information. While initial tests between groups indicated active musicians outperformed inactive musicians and nonmusicians on the CA-BAT, a generalized linear regression analysis showed that there was no significant difference once differences in musical training had been accounted for. To ensure that our results were not impacted by multicollinearity between music-related variables, nonparametric and nonlinear machine learning regressions were employed and confirmed that years of formal musical training was the only significant predictor of beat alignment ability. These results suggest that expertly perceiving fine differences in the beat is not a use-dependent ability that degrades without regular maintenance through practice or musical engagement. Instead, better beat alignment appears to be associated with more musical training regardless of continued use.

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“…Specifically, for musically active readers, the patterns found in our study suggest that both SOIs and intensity are used to do so. Since musical training can improve and shape temporal precision ( Danielsen et al, 2022 ) and metrical discrimination ( Nave-Blodgett et al, 2021 ), it is reasonable to assume that musically active readers find it easier to quickly and accurately determine the leading meter of a poem. If their reading is oriented more toward the sound gestalt of the text and less toward comprehension, this should potentially minimize prediction errors regarding timing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What a difference a syllable makes—Rhythmic reading of poetry

Beck

Konieczny

2023

Front. Psychol.

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In reading conventional poems aloud, the rhythmic experience is coupled with the projection of meter, enabling the prediction of subsequent input. However, it is unclear how top-down and bottom-up processes interact. If the rhythmicity in reading loud is governed by the top-down prediction of metric patterns of weak and strong stress, these should be projected also onto a randomly included, lexically meaningless syllable. If bottom-up information such as the phonetic quality of consecutive syllables plays a functional role in establishing a structured rhythm, the occurrence of the lexically meaningless syllable should affect reading and the number of these syllables in a metrical line should modulate this effect. To investigate this, we manipulated poems by replacing regular syllables at random positions with the syllable “tack”. Participants were instructed to read the poems aloud and their voice was recorded during the reading. At the syllable level, we calculated the syllable onset interval (SOI) as a measure of articulation duration, as well as the mean syllable intensity. Both measures were supposed to operationalize how strongly a syllable was stressed. Results show that the average articulation duration of metrically strong regular syllables was longer than for weak syllables. This effect disappeared for “tacks”. Syllable intensities, on the other hand, captured metrical stress of “tacks” as well, but only for musically active participants. Additionally, we calculated the normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) for each line as an indicator for rhythmic contrast, i.e., the alternation between long and short, as well as louder and quieter syllables, to estimate the influence of “tacks” on reading rhythm. For SOI the nPVI revealed a clear negative effect: When “tacks” occurred, lines appeared to be read less altering, and this effect was proportional to the number of tacks per line. For intensity, however, the nPVI did not capture significant effects. Results suggests that top-down prediction does not always suffice to maintain a rhythmic gestalt across a series of syllables that carry little bottom-up prosodic information. Instead, the constant integration of sufficiently varying bottom-up information appears necessary to maintain a stable metrical pattern prediction.

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Sounds familiar(?): Expertise with specific musical genres modulates timing perception and micro-level synchronization to auditory stimuli

Cited by 13 publications

References 75 publications

Probabilistic modelling of microtiming perception

Probabilistic modelling of microtiming perception

Beat alignment ability is associated with formal musical training not current music playing

What a difference a syllable makes—Rhythmic reading of poetry

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