Invariance of edit-distance to tempo in rhythm similarity

Abstract

Despite the long history of music psychology, rhythm similarity perception remains largely unexplored. Several studies suggest that edit-distance—the minimum number of notational changes required to transform one rhythm into another—predicts similarity judgments. However, the ecological validity of edit-distance remains elusive. We investigated whether the edit-distance model can predict perceptual similarity between rhythms that also differed in a fundamental characteristic of music—tempo. Eighteen participants rated the similarity between a series of rhythms presented in a pairwise fashion. The edit-distance of these rhythms varied from 1 to 4, and tempo was set at either 90 or 150 beats per minute (BPM). A test of congruence among distance matrices (CADM) indicated significant inter-participant reliability of ratings, and non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) visualized that the ratings were clustered based upon both tempo and whether rhythms shared an identical onset pattern, a novel effect we termed rhythm primacy. Finally, Mantel tests revealed significant correlations of edit-distance with similarity ratings on both within- and between-tempo rhythms. Our findings corroborated that the edit-distance predicts rhythm similarity and demonstrated that the edit-distance accounts for similarity of rhythms that are markedly different in tempo. This suggests that rhythmic gestalt is invariant to differences in tempo.

Children With Developmental Language Disorder Show Deficits in the Production of Musical Rhythmic Groupings

“…It is possible that these nonlinguistic rhythmic sequences show different positional effects compared to spoken language. Stimuli presented earlier in a musical sequence benefit from a “rhythm primacy” effect ( Moritz et al, 2020 ), while in language, children “pay attention to the end of words” ( Slobin, 1985 ).…”