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

Abstract

A set of behavioral tasks for assessing perceptual and sensorimotor timing abilities in the general population (i.e., non-musicians) is presented here with the goal of uncovering rhythm disorders, such as beat deafness. Beat deafness is characterized by poor performance in perceiving durations in auditory rhythmic patterns or poor synchronization of movement with auditory rhythms (e.g., with musical beats). These tasks include the synchronization of finger tapping to the beat of simple and complex auditory stimuli and the detection of rhythmic irregularities (anisochrony detection task) embedded in the same stimuli. These tests, which are easy to administer, include an assessment of both perceptual and sensorimotor timing abilities under different conditions (e.g., beat rates and types of auditory material) and are based on the same auditory stimuli, ranging from a simple metronome to a complex musical excerpt. The analysis of synchronized tapping data is performed with circular statistics, which provide reliable measures of synchronization accuracy (e.g., the difference between the timing of the taps and the timing of the pacing stimuli) and consistency. Circular statistics on tapping data are particularly well-suited for detecting individual differences in the general population. Synchronized tapping and anisochrony detection are sensitive measures for identifying profiles of rhythm disorders and have been used with success to uncover cases of poor synchronization with spared perceptual timing. This systematic assessment of perceptual and sensorimotor timing can be extended to populations of patients with brain damage, neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., Parkinson's disease), and developmental disorders (e.g., Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Video LinkThe video component of this article can be found at

Relative Contributions of the Speed Characteristic and Other Possible Ecological Factors in Synchronization to a Visual Beat Consisting of Periodically Moving Stimuli

“…The data were analyzed using a circular analysis method in which the difference between the time of a tap and the time of the corresponding event onset was assessed by the relative phase (RP) on a unit circle (Fisher, 1993 ; Hove et al, 2013a ). The present study focused on the analysis of synchronization stability because it has been suggested that the stability is more sensitive in identifying individual differences of synchronization performances as compared with the mean asynchrony (Hove et al, 2013a ; Dalla Bella and Sowinski, 2015 ). Synchronization stability was indexed by R, which was the length of the resultant of the RPs (Hove et al, 2013a ).…”

“…We used circular analysis methods because they are more suitable for the variable periodic synchronization data than the standard linear analysis methods (Fisher, 1993 ; Patel et al, 2009 ; Hove et al, 2013a ). Moreover, the circular analysis methods have been suggested to be suitable for poor synchronization performance (Repp and Su, 2013 ; Dalla Bella and Sowinski, 2015 ). The analyses were performed using the CircStat toolbox (Philipp, 2009 ) programmed with MATLAB.…”

Moving to the Beat and Singing are Linked in Humans

“…This condition indicates self-identified difficulties in tracking or moving to the beat of an external auditory stimulus, such as music or a metronome (Palmer et al, 2014 ). In particular, two cases have been recently described in our laboratory showing poor synchronization to a beat in the absence of impaired rhythm perception (Sowiński and Dalla Bella, 2013 ; Dalla Bella and Sowiński, 2015 ). These findings, reminiscent of the dissociation between perception and action found in poor-pitch singers (Dalla Bella et al, 2007 , 2009 ; Pfordresher and Brown, 2007 ; Loui et al, 2008 ; for a review, see Dalla Bella et al, 2011 ), point to impaired sensorimotor mapping mechanisms in beat deafness.…”

Tapping Into Rate Flexibility: Musical Training Facilitates Synchronization Around Spontaneous Production Rates

“…This test is sensitive to unimodal departures from uniformity, with a significant result indicating a unimodal distribution. Following previous synchronization measures ( Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009 ; Pecenka and Keller, 2011 ; Sowiński and Dalla Bella, 2013 ; Dalla Bella and Sowiński, 2015 ), trials in which the null hypothesis of circular uniformity could not be rejected (i.e., the distribution was not unimodal) at p < 0.05 were excluded from further analysis (musicians: 0% of trials excluded; non-musicians: 9% of trials excluded).…”