“Lost in time” but still moving to the beat
Section snippets
1. Introduction
One of the most compelling reactions to music is to move to its beat. Humans spontaneously or intentionally tend to clap their hands, sway their body, or tap their feet to the beat of music. Synchronizing movement to the beat (Repp, 2005, Repp and Su, 2013) involves the coordination of a discrete action with a sequence of rhythmic auditory events (e.g., tones of a metronome or musical beats). This complex activity is supported by a neuronal network, including areas devoted to tracking the
2.1.1. Cases histories
L.A., L.C., and L.V. were 21-year-old female university students recruited at the University of Montpellier. L.A. and L.V. had not received any musical training. L.C., in spite of the fact that she received 5 years of non-formal piano lessons, considers herself a non-musician. She practiced less than 1 h a week during her musical training, and has rarely played the piano in the last 7 years. L.V. complained about difficulties in finding the beat in music, especially while dancing, singing, or
3.1.1. Participants
The three beat-deaf participants tested in Exp. 1 (L.A., L.C. and L.V.) participated in Exp. 2. Five age-matched participants (3 females) who did not take part in Exp. 12 formed the control group (mean age: 25 years, SD: 3.39, range: 20–28).
3.1.2. Material and procedure
The implicit timing task is an adaptation of the classical temporal orienting
4. General discussion
Here we presented two cases of beat deafness (L.A. and L.C.) showing that poor beat perception can co-occur with spared synchronization to the beat. A third case (L.V.) displayed severe timing deficits encompassing perception and action. L.A. and L.C. showed poor perception of changes in regular auditory periodic sequences, or in judging whether a metronome is aligned or not to the beat of music. In spite of poor perception, however, they could tap to the beat of the same stimulus. To the best
Acknowledgments
We thank the Editor and two anonymous Reviewers for their constructive comments on a first draft of the manuscript. The study was supported by a grant from the European Community (EBRAMUS, 7th Framework Programme, grant agreement no. 238157) to SDB and SK, and by a Junior Grant from the Institut Universitaire de France to SDB. AC and DC are supported by the Junta de Andalucía (SEJ-3054) and FPU research grant.
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