So You Think You Can't Dance? (The Mysterious Case of the Guy with Two Left Feet)

So you think you can't dance? (The mysterious case of the guy with two left feet) Mathieu did not just suddenly come to realize this problem, and he did not give up easily. He spent most of his 23 years of life studying music (various instruments , voice) and dance (Latin dance lessons, and he even performed in a dance troupe at a family amusement park!), only to find, time after time, that he could not keep up with the musical beat. When he attended concerts with his friends, everyone clapped along in time while watching the musicians on stage, Mathieu turned to watch his friends, in an attempt to clap in time by watching them. He sought help from his friends and private tutors, and sometimes just threw his cares away and danced publicly with his friends. Still, there seemed to be no remedy for his deficit. So what was wrong? A group of music neuroscientists tracked down Mathieu (using advertisements that said " Do you have no rhythm? Have two left feet? Do you think you can't dance? ") and brought him to the laboratory to find out what might be the problem. The task they gave Mathieu – and 33 dancers who reported no rhythm problems – was to listen to a popular Latin dance song, of the merengue style, and to simply bend at the knees and bounce to the beat. In order to measure the timing of Mathieu's bounces, they used a commonly known device for capturing motion data: the remote control of the Nintendo Wii (Figure 1). Why did they use a Nintendo Wii to capture the body movement? Because, with an accelerometer inside the Wii, this instrument recorded the periodicity of Mathieu's bounces, down to the level of 10 ms – information which the researchers stored for analysis. They then compared the periodicity of Mathieu's bounces with the period – also known as tempo – of the Latin music. If Mathieu could feel the rhythm of the merengue, then his body movement would have a periodicity similar to the music's tempo. Furthermore, if he really moved in time with the music, then his body motion would be phase locked to the musical beat – that is, when his knees would finally hit their lowest point (" bam! "), that point would coincide precisely with the thump of the musical beat (think: bass drum). …