Tapping to a slow tempo in the presence of simple and complex musical meters reveals experience-specific biases for processing music

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 (measured in relative phase). When inter-tone intervals were filled with simple-meter rhythms, American listeners tapped later than targets, but their asynchronies were smaller and declined more rapidly. Likewise, asynchronies rose sharply following a switch away from simple-meter but not from complex-meter rhythm. By contrast, Indian listeners performed similarly across all rhythm types, with asynchronies rapidly declining over the course of complexand simple-meter trials. For these listeners, a switch from either simple or complex meter increased asynchronies. Experiment 2 tested American listeners but doubled the duration of the synchronization phase prior to (and after) the switch. Here, compared with simple meters, complex-meter rhythms elicited larger asynchronies that declined at a slower rate, however, asynchronies increased after the switch for all conditions. Our results provide evidence that ease of meter processing depends to a great extent on the amount of experience with specific meters. Citation: Ullal-Gupta S, Hannon EE, Snyder JS (2014) Tapping to a Slow Tempo in the Presence of Simple and Complex Meters Reveals Experience-Specific Biases for Processing Music. PLoS ONE 9(7): e102962. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102962 Editor: Trevor Bruce Penney, National University of Singapore, Singapore Received July 31, 2011; Accepted June 26, 2014; Published July 30, 2014 Copyright: 2014 Ullal-Gupta et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The research was supported in part by a travel grant from the International Programs Office, University of Nevada, Las Vegas awarded to S.U. and summer research stipends from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada Las Vegas awarded to E.E.H. and J.S.S. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * Email: [email protected]