Influence of musical groove on postural sway.

Abstract

Timescales of postural fluctuation reflect underlying neuromuscular processes in balance control that are influenced by sensory information and the performance of concurrent cognitive and motor tasks. An open question is how postural fluctuations entrain to complex environmental rhythms, such as in music, which also vary on multiple timescales. Musical groove describes the property of music that encourages auditory-motor synchronization and is used to study voluntary motor entrainment to rhythmic sounds. The influence of groove on balance control mechanisms remains unexplored. We recorded fluctuations in center of pressure (CoP) of standing participants (N = 40) listening to low and high groove music and during quiet stance. We found an effect of musical groove on radial sway variability, with the least amount of variability in the high groove condition. In addition, we observed that groove influenced postural sway entrainment at various temporal scales. For example, with increasing levels of groove, we observed more entrainment to shorter, local timescale rhythmic musical occurrences. In contrast, we observed more entrainment to longer, global timescale features of the music, such as periodicity, with decreasing levels of groove. Finally, musical experience influenced the amount of postural variability and entrainment at local and global timescales. We conclude that groove in music and musical experience can influence the neural mechanisms that govern balance control, and discuss implications of our findings in terms of multiscale sensorimotor coupling. (PsycINFO Database Record

Analysis of the Movement-Inducing Effects of Music through the Fractality of Head Sway during Standstill

“…The multi-scale correspondences between music and CoP sway found by Ross et al (2016) shed light on the complex mechanisms that underlie human posture control and its sensorimotor aspects. It has been shown that the human posture control system is not based on one single physical principle.…”

“…Previously, Ross et al (2016) explored the influence of musical groove on balance control mechanisms during standing. This was done by correlating events in the recorded center of pressure (CoP) time series with events in the music stimuli of varying groove content.…”

“…Furthermore, fluctuations in postural sway have been shown to be associated with neuromuscular processes during balance control that are highly influenced by sensory information and cognitive tasks (Balasubramaniam and Wing, 2002;Duarte and Sternad, 2008). The characterization of such links between postural fluctuations and complex environmental rhythms across temporal scales can reveal fundamental information on both balance control and music cognition mechanisms (Ross et al, 2016;Balasubramaniam and Wing, 2002).…”

Motor simulation theories of musical beat perception

“…A tight relationship between movement and auditory rhythm perception is evident in human motor system response and motor involvement during music listening and rhythm tasks (Iversen & Balasubramaniam, 2016;Janata, Tomic, & Haberman, 2012;Repp, 2005a;Repp, 2005b;Ross, Warlaumont, Abney, Rigoli, & Balasubramaniam, 2016), and can be observed in neural response to music early in infant development (Kuhl, Ramirez, Bosseler, Lin, & Imada, 2014). How we move to music has by itself become a systematic subfield of inquiry (Ross et al, 2016) that often focuses on body synchronization with music.…”

“…How we move to music has by itself become a systematic subfield of inquiry (Ross et al, 2016) that often focuses on body synchronization with music. Some have suggested that the link between auditory and motor involvement in music could be similar to that found in language (Patel, Iversen, & Rosenberg, 2006).…”