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Hearing what the body feels: auditory encoding of rhythmic movement
Jessica Phillips-Silver1, Laurel J Trainor
1Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada L8S 4K1.
Cognition
|January 2, 2007
Summary
Movement shapes how adults perceive musical rhythm. Bouncing to ambiguous rhythms influenced later auditory perception, suggesting a fundamental, lifelong link between body movement and music processing.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Auditory Perception
- Music Cognition
Background:
- Infants demonstrate cross-modal interactions between body movement and auditory rhythm encoding.
- The influence of body movement on adult auditory perception of musical rhythm remains less understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how body movement influences adults' auditory perception of musical rhythm.
- To determine if this movement-sound interaction is fundamental to music processing throughout life.
Main Methods:
- Adults were trained to interpret ambiguous rhythms (march vs. waltz) through specific bouncing movements.
- Participants then identified auditory rhythm patterns based on their prior movement experience.
- Experiments controlled for visual information, isolating the effect of body movement.
Main Results:
- Adults perceived auditory rhythms as more similar when the accents matched their trained bouncing pattern.
- This effect was independent of visual cues, highlighting the critical role of bodily movement.
- Results showed parallel findings between adult and infant studies.
Conclusions:
- Body movement significantly influences the auditory perception of musical rhythm in adults.
- The movement-sound interaction in music processing is established early in development and persists throughout life.
- This interaction is fundamental to how humans process music.
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