Keeping the Beat: A Large Sample Study of Bouncing and Clapping to Music

RESEARCH ARTICLE Keeping the Beat: A Large Sample Study of Bouncing and Clapping to Music Pauline Tranchant1,2, Dominique T. Vuvan1,2, Isabelle Peretz1,2* 1 Département de psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2 International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada * a11111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Tranchant P, Vuvan DT, Peretz I (2016) Keeping the Beat: A Large Sample Study of Bouncing and Clapping to Music. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0160178. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0160178 Editor: Ramesh Balasubramaniam, University of California Merced, UNITED STATES Abstract The vast majority of humans move in time with a musical beat. This behaviour has been mostly studied through finger-tapping synchronization. Here, we evaluate naturalistic synchronization responses to music–bouncing and clapping–in 100 university students. Their ability to match the period of their bounces and claps to those of a metronome and musical clips varying in beat saliency was assessed. In general, clapping was better synchronized with the beat than bouncing, suggesting that the choice of a specific movement type is an important factor to consider in the study of sensorimotor synchronization processes. Performance improved as a function of beat saliency, indicating that beat abstraction plays a significant role in synchronization. Fourteen percent of the population exhibited marked difficulties with matching the beat. Yet, at a group level, poor synchronizers showed similar sensitivity to movement type and beat saliency as normal synchronizers. These results suggest the presence of quantitative rather than qualitative variations when losing the beat. Received: December 21, 2015 Accepted: July 14, 2016 Published: July 29, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Tranchant et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All data are available at dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3408898.v1. Funding: This work was funded by grant # 201404068 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) [http://www. nserc-crsng.gc.ca/index_eng.asp] to IP. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Humans move to musical rhythms by nodding the head, clapping the hands or dancing in time with perceived periodicities in musical stimuli–that is, with the musical beat. Such movements are spontaneous and observed across cultures [1]. Infants show a rhythmic motor response to music before the age of two [2] but it is only between the ages of 2.5 and 4.5 that the flexibility required to match their movement tempo to those of the stimuli starts to develop [3].The behavioural and neural mechanisms required by the capacity for rhythmic sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) are presently the topic of intense research (see [4,5] for reviews). The vast majority of the studies conducted in this area have investigated finger tapping. Yet, finger tapping leaves out important aspects of the processes involved in SMS to music, such as the diversity of natural movements and the feedback they provide, as well as the pleasurable aspect of moving to music. Different movements may recruit different mechanisms. For example, different timing and motor control mechanisms may underlie the production of continuous versus discrete periodic movements (such as tapping). Emergent properties of the movement dynamics and the PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0160178 July 29, 2016 1 / 19 Bouncing and Clapping to Music representation of event-based timing seem to differentiate continuous from discrete movements [6–9]. This distinction is supported by several findings. Temporal precision in finger tapping and continuous drawing is not related within individuals [10,11], and different autocorrelation patterns characterize the period and asynchronies for discrete versus continuous synchronization [12,13]. Furthermore, patients with cerebellar damage show preserved circle drawing (continuous) but impaired finger tapping (discrete) when asked to time their movement to isochronous tones [14]. Second, vestibular stimulation, which varies when bending the knees to move the trunk up and down in bouncing, is constant in finger tapping and clapping. Yet vestibular stimulation appears to drive beat finding in music. Indeed, bouncing to a specific meter while listening to a rhythmic pattern can affect perceptual meter judgments [15,16]. This is also found for motion of the head only (as opposed to the legs) and whole-body passive motion [17], suggesting that it is the manipulation of vestibular information that is playing a crucial role. Last but not least, the desire to move to certain types of music, a phenomenon referred to as groove [18], is a highly pleasurable experience [19]. When exposed to music, people spontaneously start to move their foot, head and/or trunk [20]. Preventing listeners from moving their body actually reduces their ability to find the beat [21]. Moreover, participants prefer to move freely with music rather than to be directed to make hand-tapping movements only [20]. Restricting a participant’s movements such that they may only move their finger, as is the case in tapping studies, is likely to restrain this participant’s feeling of 'being in the groove'. This is not only because participants are required by the experiment to perform a specific gesture, but also because that gesture may not be one that arises spontaneously in non-experimental contexts. As groove is an important aspect of motor engagement during music listening [22] and of the quality of sensorimotor coupling [20], the experimental study of movements that occur spontaneously outside of the lab may help improve the understanding of some important aspects of SMS to music in humans. In sum, the way we move has an influence on how we interpret, enjoy and synchronize to musical rhythms. A few studies have explored the effects of using different effectors, such as finger versus foot [23] or finger versus drumstick [24] on the quality of isochronous synchronization, and there is a growing literature on the synchronization of gait (e.g. [25,26]) and dancelike movements (e.g. [16,27,28]) to music. However, no studies so far have compared different forms of naturalistic but qualitatively distinct movement, such as bouncing and clapping during synchronization to music. This comparison was the primary goal of the current study. A second goal of the current study was to explore the effect of beat saliency on clapping and bouncing. Synchronization to music requires the perceptual encoding of a periodi (...truncated)