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Tapping To A Slow Tempo In The Presence Of Simple And Complex Musical Meters Reveals Experience-Specific Biases For Processing Music, Sangeeta Ullal-Gupta, Erin E. Hannon, Joel S. Snyder

Psychology Faculty Research

Musical meters vary considerably across cultures, yet relatively little is known about how culture-specific experience influences metrical processing. In Experiment 1, we compared American and Indian listeners' synchronous tapping to slow sequences. Inter-tone intervals contained silence or to-be-ignored rhythms that were designed to induce a simple meter (familiar to Americans and Indians) or a complex meter (familiar only to Indians). A subset of trials contained an abrupt switch from one rhythm to another to assess the disruptive effects of contradicting the initially implied meter. In the unfilled condition, both groups tapped earlier than the target and showed large tap-tone asynchronies …