Twirling Triplets: The Qualia of Rotation and Musical Rhythm

Abstract

While musicologists have long noted that triplet rhythms evoke sensations of rotation in listeners, no theory has been proposed to account for this apparent association. To investigate this phenomenon, 33 excerpts of "spinning, rotating, twirling, or swirling" music were crowd-sourced from an online discussion forum. Analysis revealed a prominence of fast, repeated, isochronous patterns using stepwise pitch movement, with significantly more compound meters than generally found in Western music. Inspired by ecological acoustics, an Ecological Theory of Rotating Sounds (ETRoS) is proposed to explain these associations. The theory maps patterns of loudness fluctuations to trajectories of rotating sound sources. Two experiments tested the theory. In Experiment A, listeners rated how much binary, ternary, quaternary, and quinary figures (of 2-5 notes) evoked sensations of rotation. Experiment B used a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm pitting ecological quaternary stimuli (strong-medium-weak-medium) against unecological stimuli with permuted stress values more typical of Western music (strong-weak-medium-weak). Results indicate that perceived rotation increases with tempo and is poorly evoked by binary rhythms. Loudness patterns consistent with rotating trajectories were perceived as more rotating than unecological patterns-but only when pitch was also moving. Altogether, moderate support is provided for an acoustic-ecological account of rotating sounds.

Simulating musical rotation, contour and notes: perception of (e)motion in nonmusicians

“…Altogether, these results support the embodied music cognition framework (Godøy and Leman, 2010;Cox, 2017) and the voice as source domain and mimetic subvocalization hypotheses (Cox, 2017), in particular. They also provide strong empirical evidence for enduring notions of melodic motion (e.g., Hanslick, 1891;Schenker, 1854;Truslit, 1938;Pratt, 1931;Sessions, 1941;Zuckerkandl, 1956), and moderate support for the Ecological Theory of Rotating Sounds (Hansen and Huron 2019). Future studies are needed to further investigate the perception of rotation in melodies with different note patterns controlled for note density (i.e., modified accent structures), as well as the impact of the musical gestures of contour and rotation on cortical sensorimotor activation in the brain.…”

“…Applying the Gibsonian perspective to the study of music, ecological acoustics studies the relationship between human beings and their environment as mediated through sound, positing that listeners acquire practical knowledge from sounds in their acoustical surroundings rather than abstract concepts such as frequency, duration, and intensity. Hansen and Huron (2019) suggest that one such phenomenon is the perception of triplet rhythms. Although music scholars have long been aware of the sensation of rotation evoked in listeners, Hansen and Huron observe that no theory has been proposed to account for this "apparent association".…”

“…Drawing from the domain of ecological acoustics, the authors propose an Ecological Theory of Rotating Sounds (EToRS), which maps fluctuations in loudness (i.e., accents) to trajectories of rotating sound sources. According to the theory, in the absence of an existing metrical context, the listener tends to hear the loudest event as marking the downbeat (Hansen and Huron 2019). Thus, if the listener is situated outside the trajectory of the rotating sound, binary patterns (two beats per measure) reduce to pendular motion, whereas ternary note patterns (three beats per measure) reduce to spinning movement, and for quaternary (four beats per measure) and quinary note patterns (five beats per measure) it is ambiguous as to whether the motion is reduced to spinning or pendular motion.…”

“…According to the framework of embodied music cognition, part of how we comprehend music is by imitating either overtly or covertly the observed sound-producing actions of performers, also known as mimetic motor imagery (Cox, 2017). The present study investigates the relationship between formal acoustic features, perceived motion (in horizontal and vertical planes) and involvement measures in nonmusicians, specifically testing the Ecological Theory of Rotating Sounds (Hansen and Huron, 2019) and the mimetic subvocalization hypothesis (Cox, 2017) using a novel, naturalistic set of stimuli.…”

A Call for Hypothesis-Driven, Multi-Level Analysis in Research on Emotional Word Painting in Music: Commentary on Sun & Cuthbert (2018)

“…This would be aptly illustrated by the use of triplet rhythms setting it aside from the immediate musical context. In recently published work, David Huron and I provide an ecological theory explaining the qualia of rotation and musical rhythm (Hansen & Huron, 2019). We argue that triplet rhythms are especially effective in conveying a sense of rotation or spinning due to their convergence with loudness trajectories generated by truly rotating, sound-emitting objects in the environment.…”