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Five-year-old children’s beat perception and beat synchronization abilities

Kathleen M. Einarson1, 2 and Laurel J. Trainor1, 2, 3*
  • 1 McMaster University, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, Canada
  • 2 McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, Canada
  • 3 Baycrest Hospital, Rotman Research Institute, Canada

Western adults without formal training have implicit knowledge of their culture’s music (Hannon & Trainor, 2007). Although simple metres are much more common than complex meters in Western music (London, 1995), young infants appear equally sensitive to both (Hannon & Trehub, 2005). Evidence of enculturation is present by 12 months, and adults perceive and reproduce rhythms with simple metrical structures more accurately than those with complex metrical structures (Hannon & Trehub, 2005; Snyder et. al, 2006). We examined five-year-old children’s perceptual sensitivity to musical beat alignment (adapting Iversen & Patel, 2008, adult task), the degree to which children synchronized their tapping to the beat of music with simple or complex metres (adapting Iversen & Patel, 2008, adult task), and whether beat production abilities correlate with perceptual sensitivity.
Children were presented with pairs of videos of puppets drumming to music with simple or complex metre. One puppet’s drumming was synchronized with the beat of the music and the other had either incorrect tempo (10% faster or slower) or incorrect phase (25% early or late). Children were asked to select the better drummer. Children then tapped on an electronic drum at a self-paced speed, with a metronome, and with musical excerpts. Five-year-olds were better able to detect beat misalignments in simple than in complex metre music for both tempo errors (p= .003) and phase errors (p= .05). Analysis of tapping synchronization is ongoing. In general, children’s ability to tap in synchrony depended more on the saliency of the beat than on metric structure.

Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by grants to LJT from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. We thank David Thompson, Gregory Atkinson, and Rebecca Lowe for their assistance with this research, and the parents and children who participated.

References

Hannon, E. E., & Trehub, S. E. (2005). Metrical categories in infancy and adulthood. Psychological Science, 16(1), 48-55.
Hannon, E. E., & Trainor, L. J. (2007). Music acquisition: effects of enculturation and formal training on development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(11), 466-472.
London, J. (2004). Hearing in time: Psychological aspects of musical meter. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Snyder, J. S., Hannon, E. E., Large, E. W., & Christiansen, M. H. (2006). Synchronization and
continuation tapping to complex meters. Music Perception, 24(2), 135-146.
Iversen, J. R., & Patel, A. D. (2008). The Beat Alignment Test (BAT): Surveying beat processing abilities in the general population. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition (ICMPC10), August 2008, Sapporo, Japan. K. Miyazaki et al. (Eds.), Adelaide: Causal Productions, p. 465-468.

Keywords: Music, development, entrainment, beat alignment, Enculturation, metre

Conference: 14th Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop Birmingham 11th - 13th September 2013, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 11 Sep - 13 Sep, 2013.

Presentation Type: Oral Presentation

Topic: Rhythm Production and Perception

Citation: Einarson KM and Trainor LJ (2013). Five-year-old children’s beat perception and beat synchronization abilities. Conference Abstract: 14th Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop Birmingham 11th - 13th September 2013. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.214.00017

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Received: 19 Jul 2013; Published Online: 24 Sep 2013.

* Correspondence: Dr. Laurel J Trainor, McMaster University, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, ljt@mcmaster.ca