The Harvard Beat Assessment Test (H-BAT): a battery for assessing beat perception and production and their dissociation

Abstract

Humans have the abilities to perceive, produce, and synchronize with a musical beat, yet there are widespread individual differences. To investigate these abilities and to determine if a dissociation between beat perception and production exists, we developed the Harvard Beat Assessment Test (H-BAT), a new battery that assesses beat perception and production abilities. H-BAT consists of four subtests: (1) music tapping test (MTT), (2) beat saliency test (BST), (3) beat interval test (BIT), and (4) beat finding and interval test (BFIT). MTT measures the degree of tapping synchronization with the beat of music, whereas BST, BIT, and BFIT measure perception and production thresholds via psychophysical adaptive stair-case methods. We administered the H-BAT on thirty individuals and investigated the performance distribution across these individuals in each subtest. There was a wide distribution in individual abilities to tap in synchrony with the beat of music during the MTT. The degree of synchronization consistency was negatively correlated with thresholds in the BST, BIT, and BFIT: a lower degree of synchronization was associated with higher perception and production thresholds. H-BAT can be a useful tool in determining an individual's ability to perceive and produce a beat within a single session.

Uncovering Beat Deafness: Detecting Rhythm Disorders with Synchronized Finger Tapping and Perceptual Timing Tasks

“…The tasks described above have been used with success to characterize the timing abilities of individuals without musical training 2,[34][35][36] . In a recent representative study on beat-deafness 2 , a group of 99 non-musicians (university students) were screened using two simple synchronization tasks.…”

“…However, we are aware of the fact that further confirmation of this dissociation would require the testing of perceptual and sensorimotor timing with a wider range of tasks, evaluating a variety of timing abilities. This objective can be achieved by using a battery of tests, such as the BAASTA 35 , as well as by including paced tapping and anisochrony detection tasks (using a maximum-likelihood procedure for computing detection thresholds) and the H-BAT 36 . Second, synchronization and perception tasks are performed with both simple and more complex auditory material; the latter includes either all of the elements of a musical piece (e.g., pitch and rhythmic structure) or solely its rhythmic features (i.e., amplitude-modulated noise).…”

“…These batteries allow researchers to obtain an exhaustive profile of an individual's timing abilities. Examples of such batteries are the beat alignment test (BAT) 34 , the Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor Timing Abilities (BAASTA) 35 , and the Harvard Beat Assessment Test (H-BAT) 36 . These batteries consist of tapping tasks with a variety of rhythmic auditory stimuli ranging from music to isochronous sequences as well as perceptual tasks (e.g., duration discrimination, detection of the alignment of a metronome to the beat of music, and anisochrony detection).…”

BAASTA: Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities

“…Other tasks make use of sequences of durations, which require the extraction of an underlying beat, thus tapping beat-based timing mechanisms (Grahn & Brett, 2009;Watson & Grahn, 2013). Material varies in these tasks from simple sequences of durations, as in the anisochrony detection task (Ehrlé & Samson, 2005;Hyde & Peretz, 2004) to complex auditory material such as metrical sequences, including different durations or intervals, or music, thus requiring memory and more complex beat extraction processes (Fujii & Schlaug, 2013;Grahn & Brett, 2009;Iversen & Patel 2008;Müllensiefen, Gingras, Musil, & Stewart, 2014;Sowiński & Dalla Bella, 2013). Sensorimotor timing skills have mostly been examined with the finger tapping paradigm, which has been in use for more than a century (Dunlap, 1910).…”

“…Perceptual timing has been studied in a number of tasks ranging from duration discrimination, estimation, production and reproduction, temporal bisection (i.e., classifying durations as comparable to "short" and "long" standards), and detection of anisochrony (i.e., determining whether there is a deviant interval within an isochronous sequence) to the beat alignment task (i.e., detecting whether a metronome superimposed onto music is aligned with the beat) (e.g., Dalla Ehrlé & Samson, 2005;Fujii & Schlaug, 2013;Grahn & Brett, 2009;Hyde & Peretz, 2004;Iversen & Patel 2008;Sowiński & Dalla Bella, 2013; for recent extensive reviews, in both healthy and patient populations, see Grondin 2008;Grondin, 2010;Merchant & de Lafuente, 2014). Some of these tasks, typical in the study of interval timing (or duration-based timing; Grube, Cooper, Chinnery, & Griffiths, 2010;Teki, Grube, Kumar, & Griffiths, 2011), make use of isolated durations.…”