It’s a Thursday morning, and I’m leading a Music Circle Time
at the local drop-in playcentre. The
kids are enthusiastic and adorable: mostly one- and two-year-olds, some
infants, and a handful of older preschoolers, all eager to sing, dance, jump,
twirl, tap and shake. I run through a
repertoire of fun songs that all involve some kind of movement. Even for sit-down songs with no obvious
actions (like “Old MacDonald had a Farm”, for example), we clap or tap to the
beat. This keeps the kids engaged, but
more importantly, it activates their sense of rhythm. Literally, they “feel” the beat of the music.
If you stop to think about this phrase, “feeling the beat”, you might find it a bit odd. Listening to music
is something we do with our hearing, not our sense of touch, right? Surely we don’t actually feel the beat any more than we can smell the colour in a painting. In fact, that’s not entirely
true. A recent study (Huang et al., 2012) published in PLoS ONE
looked at how we use different senses to “feel” the beat in music, and found
that we can perceive musical beat and meter with both hearing and touch, and
not only that, but the two types of sensory information are integrated together
in the brain.
Before we get into this, let me explain what I mean by
meter. Music almost always has a regular
beat to it, and when we listen to these beats, we hear them grouped into
patterns of strong beats and weak beats.
A slow waltz, for example, will have a pattern of strong - weak - weak,
strong - weak - weak, etc. This is known as
triple meter. A march would have a
pattern of strong - weak - strong - weak; this is duple meter. Studies have shown that even if the music is
generated such that it doesn’t actually contain strong and weak beats, people
will impose a meter upon the music and think of it as either duple or triple
meter.
In the Huang study, the subjects had to identify whether
they thought the meter of a rhythm was duple or triple. This identification
was based either on the pattern of accents put into the rhythm (i.e. some beats
were made to be louder and sound or feel like strong beats), or based simply on
whether there was generally a note or a rest where we would expect the strong beat to
be. The subjects were able to tell
easily whether the rhythm was duple or triple when the rhythm was presented as an
audible series of notes (i.e. using hearing) or when the rhythm was presented
as a series of taps on the subject’s hand (i.e. using touch). This is not a new result – previous studies
have shown that we are quite good a recognizing rhythm using touch (although,
interestingly, not with vision).
Where this new study showed something really interesting was
when the subjects had to recognize the meter using both hearing and touch. In this part of the experiment, some of the
beats were presented as audible notes, and some of the beats were presented as
taps on the hand. The subjects had to
integrate both modalities in order to identify whether the meter was triple or
duple. And the study showed that they
could, although it was easiest to identify the meter if all the strong beats
were presented in a single modality, e.g. all the strong beats were taps on the
hand and the weak beats were audible notes.
If the two different modalities of sensing rhythm were given information
that interfered with each other (i.e. the notes going to touch felt like duple
meter, and the notes going to hearing sounded like triple meter), the subjects
had a much harder time figuring out what meter the combined rhythm was in,
showing that the two types of inputs interact to a great extent. The auditory information tends to be
dominant, having a greater influence on meter perception than touch.
This study reminds me of a classic paper published in the journal Science in 2005, from Laurel Trainor’s lab. This classic study used metrically ambiguous
music (i.e. could be interpreted as duple or triple), and had infants bounced
to the beat in either two or three. Then
the music was played back to the infants with accents added so that it was clearly either in duple or triple meter, and the infants preferred the meter in which they had been
bounced. The researchers concluded that
this effect was probably due to vestibular (balance) input interacting with
auditory input. The main point was that
body movement plays an important role in rhythm perception.
All of this suggests that in order to help students with
their rhythm and meter, we should take advantage of the integration of auditory
musical information with movement and touch sensation. This works just as well with older students
as it does with my little ones at the playcentre. The more senses we can enlist to help
students feel the beat, the better.
For instance, the teacher could play the piece while the
student marches, bounces, dances or moves in some way to the beat. With younger children, the parents can bounce
them on the strong beats. This leaves
the movement to someone who presumably can feel the meter. Having the children move on their own may be
useful but if they are not feeling the beat already, asking them to move may
not improve it. There are other options,
rather than having the students get up and move: the student could sway to the beat while
playing, or nod their head. Movement of
the head strongly activates the vestibular system, so this is probably a better
reinforcer of meter than having the student just tap their foot. That being said, clapping and tapping are
also useful, although having the student move their whole leg (“walking” their
feet while sitting down) is more effective than just tapping, since the bigger
the movement, the better. The teacher or
parent could also tap the beat on the student’s shoulder while they are
playing, remembering to accent the strong beats.
In this way, they are receiving both touch and auditory information
about the meter.
I’m sure there are many other ways to incorporate touch and
balance into our daily interactions with music.
I’d be interested in other ideas – please share what works for you!
References:
Huang, J., Gamble, D., Sarnlertsophon, K., Wang, X., and
Hsiao, S. (2012). Feeling Music: Integration of Auditory and Tactile Inputs in
Musical Meter Perception. PLoS ONE 7,
e48496.
Phillips-Silver, J., and Trainor, L.J. (2005). Feeling the
Beat: Movement Influences Infant Rhythm Perception. Science 308,
1430–1430.
