Keeping the Beat: A Large Sample Study of Bouncing and Clapping to Music.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 27471854.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0160178 and PMC identifier 4966945.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The vast majority of humans move in time with a musical beat. This behaviour has been mostly studied through finger-tapping synchronization. Here, we evaluate naturalistic synchronization responses to music-bouncing and clapping-in 100 university students. Their ability to match the period of their bounces and claps to those of a metronome and musical clips varying in beat saliency was assessed. In general, clapping was better synchronized with the beat than bouncing, suggesting that the choice of a specific movement type is an important factor to consider in the study of sensorimotor synchronization processes. Performance improved as a function of beat saliency, indicating that beat abstraction plays a significant role in synchronization. Fourteen percent of the population exhibited marked difficulties with matching the beat. Yet, at a group level, poor synchronizers showed similar sensitivity to movement type and beat saliency as normal synchronizers. These results suggest the presence of quantitative rather than qualitative variations when losing the beat.
Medical subject headings
- Movement
- Music