Feeling Music: Integration of Auditory and Tactile Inputs in Musical Meter Perception

Abstract

Musicians often say that they not only hear, but also “feel” music. To explore the contribution of tactile information in “feeling” musical rhythm, we investigated the degree that auditory and tactile inputs are integrated in humans performing a musical meter recognition task. Subjects discriminated between two types of sequences, ‘duple’ (march-like rhythms) and ‘triple’ (waltz-like rhythms) presented in three conditions: 1) Unimodal inputs (auditory or tactile alone), 2) Various combinations of bimodal inputs, where sequences were distributed between the auditory and tactile channels such that a single channel did not produce coherent meter percepts, and 3) Simultaneously presented bimodal inputs where the two channels contained congruent or incongruent meter cues. We first show that meter is perceived similarly well (70%–85%) when tactile or auditory cues are presented alone. We next show in the bimodal experiments that auditory and tactile cues are integrated to produce coherent meter percepts. Performance is high (70%–90%) when all of the metrically important notes are assigned to one channel and is reduced to 60% when half of these notes are assigned to one channel. When the important notes are presented simultaneously to both channels, congruent cues enhance meter recognition (90%). Performance drops dramatically when subjects were presented with incongruent auditory cues (10%), as opposed to incongruent tactile cues (60%), demonstrating that auditory input dominates meter perception. We believe that these results are the first demonstration of cross-modal sensory grouping between any two senses.

Grades of Multisensory Awareness

“…Meter is perceptible auditorily and tactually. Huang et al (2012) demonstrate that it is also possible to audio-tactually discriminate a novel musical meter that is present neither audibly nor tactually. 'We next show in the bimodal experiments that auditory and tactile cues are integrated to produce coherent meter percepts.'…”

“…Huang et al () demonstrate that it is also possible to audio‐tactually discriminate a novel musical meter that is present neither audibly nor tactually. ‘We next show in the bimodal experiments that auditory and tactile cues are integrated to produce coherent meter percepts.’ They assert, ‘We believe that these results are the first demonstration of cross‐modal sensory grouping between any two senses’ (Huang et al, , p. 1). To illustrate this type of phenomenon, consider a simple case of intermodal meter perception using an audio‐tactual rhythm pattern.…”

Listening to another sense: somatosensory integration in the auditory system

“…The auditory -tactile interactions play a particularly important role in music perception (Huang, et al, 2012) and their neural representation is more robust in humans with musical training (Kuchenbuch, et al, 2014). …”

Bodily awareness and novel multisensory features

“…Consider the case of intermodal meter perception. A study by Huang et al (2012) found that auditory and tactile sequences were coherently grouped by musically trained subjects performing a meter recognition task. Meter, however, can be perceived by means of either audition or touch alone.…”