Can Musicians Track Two Different Beats Simultaneously?

Abstract

THE SIMULTANEOUS PRESENCE OF DIEEERENTmeters is not uncommon in Western art music and the music of various non-Western cultures. However, it is unclear how listeners and performers deal with this situation, and whether it is possible to cognitively establish and maintain different beats simultaneously without integrating them into a single metric framework. The present study is an attempt to address this issue empirically. Two rhythms, distinguished by pitch register and representing different meters (2/4 and 6/8), were presented simultaneously in various phase relation-ships, and participants (who were classically trained musicians) had to judge whether a probe fell on the heat in one or both rhythms. In a selective attention condition, they had to attend to one rhythm and to ignore the other, whereas in a divided attention condition, they had to attend to both. In Experiment 1, participants performed significantly better in the divided attention condition than predicted if they had been able to attend to only one rhythm at a time. In Experiments 2 and 3, however, which used more complex combinations of rhythms, performance did not differ significantly from chance. These results suggest that in Experiment 1 participants relied on the composite beat pattern (i.e., a nonisochronous sequence corresponding to the serial ordering of the two underlying beats) rather than tracking the two beats independently, while in Experiments 2 and 3, the level of complexity of the composite beat pattern may have prevented participants from tracking both beats simultaneously.. Diagrams of the test periods for each of the three phase conditions of Experiment 1, including aii event onsets (verticai lines) and probe positions (numbered from 0 to 12), with beat designations ("b"). Diagram (a) shows the in-phase condition, (b) shows the A-first condition, and (c) shows the B-first condition. The corresponding composite beat pattern is shown in musical notation beiow each diagram.

A Commentary on Poudrier's "Tapping to Carter: Mensural Determinacy in Complex Rhythmic Sequences"

“…This is a highly demanding and almost impossible task for "normal" music listeners (e.g., choir singers). Although, in another (highly controlled) experiment, the author was able to show that listeners are generally able to hear and differentiate two separate (less complex) musical streams with different (and more clear/simple) meter that are played/heard simultaneously, at least to a certain degree (cf., Poudrier & Repp, 2013), the present results seem to be less clear due to the exploratory character of the study.…”

Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

“…For instance, novices resort to switching between the different lines when they are asked to detect errors in two familiar melodies played at once, whereas trained musicians use a more integrative strategy (Bigand, McAdams, & Forêt, 2000;Poudrier & Repp, 2013). In general, musicians show superior online temporal monitoring (Rammsayer & Altenmüller, 2006), even when the presentation is visual (Rammsayer, Buttkus, & Altenmüller, 2012).…”

Auditory attention is divisible: Segregated tone streams can be tracked simultaneously.

“…For instance, the streams might need to have the same rhythmic structure, or similar ones (Poudrier & Repp, 2013). In our study, attention splitting may have been facilitated by the fact that the two con current streams were presented in fixed frequency registers.…”