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Polymetric Performance By Musicians, Kate Grieshaber

The Edna L. Sterling Collection

This study measured musicians' ability to perform complex motor activities, seeking to provide empirical foundation for theories of neural timing behavior. In individual sessions, each of twenty-nine right-handed undergraduate or graduate percussionists or pianists performed three polymeters (2:3, 3:4, and 4:5) with two hand combinations (L:R, R:L) in six cuing contexts: (1) Uncued, without having heard the pattern, (2) Pulsewith the first pulse of each measure provided, (3) Imitate 1-in synchrony with a computer-generated pattern heard over a loudspeaker, (4) Continue/Pulseafter matching the pattern, continuing with the first pulse of each measure, (5) Imitate 2-again matching the pattern, and (6) …