Elements of musical and dance sophistication predict musical groove perception.

Listening to groovy music is an enjoyable experience and a common human behavior in some cultures. Specifically, many listeners agree that songs they find to be more familiar and pleasurable are more likely to induce the experience of musical groove. While the pleasurable and dance-inducing effects of musical groove are omnipresent, we know less about how subjective feelings toward music, individual musical or dance experiences, or more objective musical perception abilities are correlated with the way we experience groove. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate how musical and dance sophistication relates to musical groove perception. One-hundred 24 participants completed an online study during which they rated 20 songs, considered high- or low-groove, and completed the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index, the Goldsmiths Dance Sophistication Index, the Beat and Meter Sensitivity Task, and a modified short version of the Profile for Music Perception Skills. Our results reveal that measures of perceptual abilities, musical training, and social dancing predicted the difference in groove rating between high- and low-groove music. Overall, these findings support the notion that listeners' individual experiences and predispositions may shape their perception of musical groove, although other causal directions are also possible. This research helps elucidate the correlates and possible causes of musical groove perception in a wide range of listeners.

Auditory superiority for perceiving the beat level but not measure level in music.

Auditory perception of time is superior to visual perception, both for simple intervals and beat-based musical rhythms. To what extent does this auditory advantage characterize perception of different hierarchical levels of musical meter, and how is it related to lifelong experience with music? We paired musical excerpts with auditory and visual metronomes that matched or mismatched the musical meter at the beat level (faster) and measure level (slower) and obtained fit ratings from adults and children (5-10 years). Adults exhibited an auditory advantage in this task for the beat level, but not for the measure level. Children also displayed an auditory advantage that increased with age for the beat level. In both modalities, their overall sensitivity to beat increased with age, but they were not sensitive to measure-level matching at any age. More musical training was related to enhanced sensitivity in both auditory and visual modalities for measure-level matching in adults and beat-level matching in children. These findings provide evidence for auditory superiority of beat perception across development, and they suggest that beat and meter perception develop quite gradually and rely on lifelong acquisition of musical knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Resetting of Auditory and Visual Segregation Occurs After Transient Stimuli of the Same Modality.

In the presence of a continually changing sensory environment, maintaining stable but flexible awareness is paramount, and requires continual organization of information. Determining which stimulus features belong together, and which are separate is therefore one of the primary tasks of the sensory systems. Unknown is whether there is a global or sensory-specific mechanism that regulates the final perceptual outcome of this streaming process. To test the extent of modality independence in perceptual control, an auditory streaming experiment, and a visual moving-plaid experiment were performed. Both were designed to evoke alternating perception of an integrated or segregated percept. In both experiments, transient auditory and visual distractor stimuli were presented in separate blocks, such that the distractors did not overlap in frequency or space with the streaming or plaid stimuli, respectively, thus preventing peripheral interference. When a distractor was presented in the opposite modality as the bistable stimulus (visual distractors during auditory streaming or auditory distractors during visual streaming), the probability of percept switching was not significantly different than when no distractor was presented. Conversely, significant differences in switch probability were observed following within-modality distractors, but only when the pre-distractor percept was segregated. Due to the modality-specificity of the distractor-induced resetting, the results suggest that conscious perception is at least partially controlled by modality-specific processing. The fact that the distractors did not have peripheral overlap with the bistable stimuli indicates that the perceptual reset is due to interference at a locus in which stimuli of different frequencies and spatial locations are integrated.

Hierarchical beat perception develops throughout childhood and adolescence and is enhanced in those with musical training.

Most music is temporally organized within a metrical hierarchy, having nested periodic patterns that give rise to the experience of stronger (downbeat) and weaker (upbeat) events. Musical meter presumably makes it possible to dance, sing, and play instruments in synchrony with others. It is nevertheless unclear whether or not listeners perceive multiple levels of periodicity simultaneously, and if they do, when and how they learn to do this. We tested children, adolescents, and musically trained and untrained adults with a new meter perception task. We presented excerpts of human-performed music paired with metronomes that matched or mismatched the metrical structure of the music at 2 hierarchical levels (beat and measure), and asked listeners to provide a rating of fit of metronome and music. Fit ratings suggested that adults with and without musical training were sensitive to both levels of meter simultaneously, but ratings were more strongly influenced by beat-level than by measure-level synchrony. Sensitivity to two simultaneous levels of meter was not evident in children or adolescents. Sensitivity to the beat alone was apparent in the youngest children and increased with age, whereas sensitivity to the measure alone was not present in younger children (5- to 8-year-olds). These findings suggest a prolonged period of development and refinement of hierarchical beat perception and surprisingly weak overall ability to attend to 2 beat levels at the same time across all ages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Babies know bad dancing when they see it: Older but not younger infants discriminate between synchronous and asynchronous audiovisual musical displays.

Movement to music is a universal human behavior, yet little is known about how observers perceive audiovisual synchrony in complex musical displays such as a person dancing to music, particularly during infancy and childhood. In the current study, we investigated how perception of musical audiovisual synchrony develops over the first year of life. We habituated infants to a video of a person dancing to music and subsequently presented videos in which the visual track was matched (synchronous) or mismatched (asynchronous) with the audio track. In a visual-only control condition, we presented the same visual stimuli with no sound. In Experiment 1, we found that older infants (8-12months) exhibited a novelty preference for the mismatched movie when both auditory information and visual information were available and showed no preference when only visual information was available. By contrast, younger infants (5-8months) in Experiment 2 did not discriminate matching stimuli from mismatching stimuli. This suggests that the ability to perceive musical audiovisual synchrony may develop during the second half of the first year of infancy.