The Impact of Instrument-Specific Musical Training on Rhythm Perception and Production

Abstract

Studies comparing musicians and non-musicians have shown that musical training can improve rhythmic perception and production. These findings tell us that training can result in rhythm processing advantages, but they do not tell us whether practicing a particular instrument could lead to specific effects on rhythm perception or production. The current study used a battery of four rhythm perception and production tasks that were designed to test both higher- and lower-level aspects of rhythm processing. Four groups of musicians (drummers, singers, pianists, string players) and a control group of non-musicians were tested. Within-task differences in performance showed that factors such as meter, metrical complexity, tempo, and beat phase significantly affected the ability to perceive and synchronize taps to a rhythm or beat. Musicians showed better performance on all rhythm tasks compared to non-musicians. Interestingly, our results revealed no significant differences between musician groups for the vast majority of task measures. This was despite the fact that all musicians were selected to have the majority of their training on the target instrument, had on average more than 10 years of experience on their instrument, and were currently practicing. These results suggest that general musical experience is more important than specialized musical experience with regards to perception and production of rhythms.

A silent disco: Differential effects of beat-based and pattern-based temporal expectations on persistent entrainment of low-frequency neural oscillations

“…Indeed, suppression off the beat has even be proposed to be a better indication of beat-based expectations than facilitation on the beat (Bouwer et al, in press;Breska & Deouell, 2017) Both the effects of beat-based and memory-based expectations were associated with musical training. This is consistent with a large body of research looking at the association between musical training and beat-based perception (Bouwer et al, 2018;Bouwer, Werner, Knetemann, & Honing, 2016;Cameron & Grahn, 2014;Matthews, Thibodeau, Gunther, & Penhune, 2016;Vuust et al, 2005). The finding that memory-based expectations were also associated with training is in line with a previous study showing that percussionists outperformed non-musicians on a tapping task for both rhythms with and without a regular beat (Cameron & Grahn, 2014), and is not surprising given that musical training affects many aspects of auditory perception (Moreno & Bidelman, 2014).…”

Rhythmic Prototypes Across Cultures

“…Nonetheless, they did not perform as well on the tapping task at the slow tempo, and according to our pilot experiment often found it difficult to perform the task at the fast tempo at all. Previous research relying on Western participants has shown that experience in playing instruments enhances performance in sensorimotor synchronization tasks (Manning & Schutz, 2016;Matthews, Thibodeau, Gunther, & Penhune, 2016;Repp, 2010). The present study complements this research by evidencing its cross-cultural validity.…”

Organizational principles of multidimensional predictions in human auditory attention

“…Our results indeed reveal that the perceptual advantage induced by musical expertise commonly observed in perceptual tasks (e.g. in rhythm information perception 36 , 37 , or spectral information perception 38 – 40 ) stems from the difference of operating regimes between musicians and non-musicians. In our tasks, the fact that musicians outperform non-musicians in the least predictable condition likely reflects that musicians are less susceptible to informational masking, when using both masking noise (Figs 1 and 2 ) and masking tones (Figs 3 and 6 ), also meaning that they are better in tone-in-noise perception 41 , 42 .…”