The urge to move to music is universal among humans. Unlike visual art, which is manifest across space, music is manifest across time. When listeners get carried away by the music, either through movement (such as dancing) or through reverie (such as trance), it is usually the temporal qualities of the music-its pulse, tempo, and rhythmic patterns-that put them in this state. In this article, we review studies addressing rhythm, meter, movement, synchronization, entrainment, the perception of groove, and other temporal factors that constitute a first step to understanding how and why music literally moves us. The experiments we review span a range of methodological techniques, including neuroimaging, psychophysics, and traditional behavioral experiments, and we also summarize the current studies of animal synchronization, engaging an evolutionary perspective on human rhythmic perception and cognition.

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Where is the beat in that note? Effects of attack, duration, and frequency on the perceived timing of musical and quasi-musical sounds AbstractWhen coordinating physical actions with sounds, we synchronise our actions with the perceptual center (P-center) of the sound, understood as the specific moment at which the sound is perceived to occur. Using matched sets of real and artificial musical sounds as stimuli, we probed the influence of Attack (rise time), Duration, and Frequency (center frequency) on perceived P-center location and P-center variability. Two different methods to determine the P-centers were used:Clicks aligned in-phase with the target sounds via the method of adjustment, and tapping in synchrony with the target sounds. We found that attack and duration are primary cues for Pcenter location and P-center variability, and that the latter is a useful measure of P-center shape.Probability density distributions for each stimulus display a systematic pattern of P-center shapes ranging from narrow peaks close to the onset of sounds with a fast attack and short duration, to wider and flatter shapes indicating a range synchronization points for sounds with a slow attack and long duration. The results support the conception of P-centers as not simple time points, but "beat bins" with characteristic shapes, and the shapes and locations of these beat bins are dependent upon both the stimulus and the synchronization task. Public significance statementIn music and dance, as well as many other contexts, we coordinate our physical actions with sounds. Our research shows how the fine-grained details of a sound interact in our temporal perception of it. This has implications for a wide range of applications that involve timing, from rehearsing musical ensembles to the sonification of complex patterns of information.

This paper is a music-theoretic discussion of various studies on rhythmic perception and performance and their ramifications for discussions of musical meter. Meter is defined as a stable and recurring pattern of hierarchically structured temporal expectations. Metrical patterns, although related to the pattern of interonset intervals present in the musical surface, are distinct from that pattern. Studies of subjective rhythmization, spontaneous tempo, pulse perception, durational discrimination, and so forth are discussed with respect to their implications for meter. Not only do there seem to be upper and lower bounds for musical meter (from ≅≅100 ms to ≅≅6 s, depending on context), but there also appear to be important thresholds within this range (around 200––250 ms, 500––700 ms, and 1.5––2.0 s). Interactions between beats (i.e., interonset intervals between expectancies occurring at the rate perceived as the tactus), beat subdivision, and changes in tempo are discussed, and it is hypothesized that beat perception may require (at least potentially) the perception of a concomitant level of subdivision. The interactions between beat interonset interval, subdivision interonset interval, and various thresholds may also explain (in part) some of the differences in the expressive and/or motional character of rhythmic figures (duplets versus triplets) at different tempos. Last, a broader discussion of systematic relationships in larger metrical systems with respect to tempo is given. It is shown that the choice of tempo systematically constrains the number and kind of metric patterns that are available to the listener.

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Studies of musical corpora have given empirical grounding to the various features that characterize particular musical styles and genres. Palmer & Krumhansl (1990) found that in Western classical music the likeliest places for a note to occur are the most strongly accented beats in a measure, and this was also found in subsequent studies using both Western classical and folk music corpora (Huron & Ommen, 2006;Temperley, 2010). We present a rhythmic analysis of a corpus of 15 performances of percussion music from Bamako, Mali. In our corpus, the relative frequency of note onsets in a given metrical position does not correspond to patterns of metrical accent, though there is a stable relationship between onset frequency and metrical position. The implications of this non-congruence between simple statistical likelihood and metrical structure for the ways in which meter and metrical accent may be learned and understood are discussed, along with importance of cross-cultural studies for psychological research.

This paper focuses on two pieces, “Ngòn Fariman” and “Bire,” representatives of two ethnically and regionally specific styles of Mande dance music from Mali, Bambara and Khasonka drumming. After introducing their performance contexts, instrumentation, and the basic roles of each part in their respective ensembles (i.e., the core metrical accompaniment, the piece-determining “hook,” and the improvising and regulative lead drum), timing data from several performances of each piece are analyzed, providing evidence of discrete categories of beat subdivision (Long vs. Short) as well as evidence of expressive variations within each category. The effects of a large-scale structural acceleration, characteristic of Malian drumming, and the presence of performer-specific microtiming patterns are also assessed. The implications of subdivision timing in Mande drumming for more general theories of metric well formedness are discussed, and we argue that such theories require a broader sense of (a) how non-isochrony may be integrated into a metrical framework, and (b) how metric theories need to reflect level-specific aspects of well-formedness. We also posit that the timing of beat subdivisions in Mande drumming have analogs in other music, most notably the “swing ratio” in jazz.

It has long been assumed that rhythm cognition builds on perceptual categories tied to prototypes defined by small-integer ratios, such as 1:1 and 2:1. This study aims to evaluate the relative contributions of both generic constraints and selected cultural particularities in shaping rhythmic prototypes. We experimentally tested musicians’ synchronization (finger tapping) with simple periodic rhythms at two different tempi with participants in Mali, Bulgaria, and Germany. We found support both for the classic assumption that 1:1 and 2:1 prototypes are widespread across cultures and for culture-dependent prototypes characterized by more complex ratios such as 3:2 and 4:3. Our findings suggest that music-cultural environments specify links between music performance patterns and perceptual prototypes.