Tapping to Carter: Mensural Determinacy in Complex Rhythmic Sequences

Abstract

The tapping paradigm has played an important role in formulating beat induction models. However, experimental studies that make use of actual music as source materials to investigate pulse finding mechanisms in complex rhythmic sequences are lacking. The present study proposes to use the concept of mensural determinacy, that is, the emergence of temporal expectations that may or may not be realized (Hasty, 1997), to explore the relative salience of an implied beat in two contrasting rhythmic sequences extracted from Elliott Carter's 90+ for piano (1994), and test the influence of style-specific expertise on listeners' spontaneous tapping performance. The results of the experiment were consistent with the hypothesis that familiarity with the style represented by the source materials contributes to a more stable tapping period. In addition, although accent was found to have a main effect on tapping behavior, it also interacted with global temporal structure and a number of musical parameters and participant characteristics, including gender. Exploratory analyses of several additional musical parameters and participants' characteristics are also suggestive of how experimental methods could be complemented by post-hoc score analysis to investigate the contributions of specific factors to the relative influence of first-and second-order periodicity on musicians' beat percepts.

Differences in limb coordination in polyrhythmic production among water polo players, artistic swimmers and drummers

“…The second potential limitation is the gender effect. Due to the requirements and characteristics of artistic swimming, water polo, and drumming, the groups tested in the present study were not well balanced in gender, which might have influenced the results as suggested by Poudrier (2018). However, Aoki, Furuya, and Kinoshita (2005) and Au, Seah, Li, and Tan (2015) reported that gender had no influence on tapping ability.…”

The Influence of Rate and Accentuation on Subjective Rhythmization

“…These findings may have been related to the magnitude of change used to create accents (e.g., Ellis & Jones, 2009, used two to five semitones differences, while the current study used only one semitone difference), a limitation that could be addressed in future experiments. On the other hand, there is also some evidence that the effect of different types of accents on beat perception may differ based on participants' musical expertise (Bouwer, Burgoyne, Odijk, Honing, & Grahn, 2018;Poudrier, 2017). In the current study, post hoc observations of grouping preferences based on native language and music training provide further evidence that basic auditory processes supporting pulse perception may be shaped by enculturation (Hannon, Soley, & Ullal, 2012;Iversen, Patel, & Ohgushi, 2008).…”

From beat tracking to beat expectation: Cognitive-based beat tracking for capturing pulse clarity through time

“…To obtain a pulse clarity metric from empirical data, we looked into the annotator's tapping variability when tapping to the MIREX musical excerpts. We looked into the coefficient of variability (CV) of the inter-tap intervals of each annotator in each track [34]. The normalization of the coefficient of variability considers the variability with respect to the tapping rate selected by the listener.…”