The Ecology of Entrainment: Foundations of Coordinated Rhythmic Movement

Abstract

Entrainment has been studied in a variety of contexts including music perception, dance, verbal communication and motor coordination more generally. Here we seek to provide a unifying framework that incorporates the key aspects of entrainment as it has been studied in these varying domains. We propose that there are a number of types of entrainment that build upon pre-existing adaptations that allow organisms to perceive stimuli as rhythmic, to produce periodic stimuli, and to integrate the two using sensory feedback. We suggest that social entrainment is a special case of spatiotemporal coordination where the rhythmic signal originates from another individual. We use this framework to understand the function and evolutionary basis for coordinated rhythmic movement and to explore questions about the nature of entrainment in music and dance. The framework of entrainment presented here has a number of implications for the vocal learning hypothesis and other proposals for the evolution of coordinated rhythmic behavior across an array of species.

Bodily Interactions in Motion-Based Music Applications

“…In human beings, the firing frequency of auditory neurons when receiving an external rhythmic stimulus influences the firing frequency of motor neurons, causing over time a coordinated movement (Thaut et al, 2015 p. 2). This resonates with the model of entrainment proposed by Phillips-Silver et al (2010), according to whom entrainment is composed of three phases:…”

“…From the biomusicological point of view, entrainment is an organism's ability to synchronize movements in the presence of an external rhythmic stimulus. Thus, although music is the most studied and complex source of coordinated movements, entrainment is a very common biological occurrence that does not depend on music or musical rhythm only, but also transpires in a great number of acoustical and nonacoustical events (Phillips-Silver, Aktipis, & Bryant, 2010). Consequently, the synchronization required for interaction in musical environments must be considered as a particular case among various other forms of movement coordination found in musical and in nonmusical environments.…”

Rhythmic entrainment: Why humans want to, fireflies can’t help it, pet birds try, and sea lions have to be bribed

“…Penhune, Zatorre, & Evans, 1998;Phillips-Silver, Aktipis, & Bryant, 2010). Humans can match finger-taps to an auditory or a tactile metronome with equal fidelity (Elliott, Wing, & Welchman, 2010, and rhythmic vestibular input causes both adults and infants to interpret an ambiguously timed auditory beat as duple meter or triple meter (Phillips-Silver & Trainor, 2005, 2007Trainor et al, 2009).…”

Convergence of speech rate in conversation predicts cooperation

“…Hagen and Bryant (2003) showed that better temporal coordination in a music performance positively affected third party judgments of coalition quality between the musicians. While social entrainment may have evolved in many species from the simpler adaptive ability to entrain one's behavior to rhythmic information in the physical environment (Phillips-Silver et al, 2010), human interpersonal synchrony is moderated by many social factors and interacts in complex ways with group membership and the dynamics of alliance formation (Miles, Griffiths et al, 2009;Miles, Lumsden, et al, 2011 Laughter is another interactive phenomenon that can involve behavioral coordination and may be associated with cooperative behavior. Research has shown that people who have known each other longer tend to laugh together more (Bryant, 2012;Smoski & Bachorowski, 2003a) and familiarity between conversationalists is perceptible in the co-laughter itself (Bryant, 2012).…”