I argue that core aspects of musical rhythm, especially "groove" and syncopation, can only be fully understood in the context of their origins in the participatory social experience of dance. Musical meter is first considered in the context of bodily movement. I then offer an interpretation of the pervasive but somewhat puzzling phenomenon of syncopation in terms of acoustic emphasis on certain...

Moving to music is an essential human pleasure particularly related to musical groove. Structurally, music associated with groove is often characterised by rhythmic complexity in the form of syncopation, frequently observed in musical styles such as funk, hip-hop and electronic dance music. Structural complexity has been related to positive affect in music more broadly, but the function of sync...

Computational analysis of the rhythmic/metrical structure of music from recorded audio is a hot research topic in music information retrieval. Recent research has explored the explicit modeling of characteristic rhythmic patterns as a way to improve upon existing beat-tracking algorithms, which typically fail on dealing with syncopated or polyrhythmic music. This work takes the Uruguayan Candom...

Little is known about whether infants perceive meter, the underlying temporal structure of music. We employed a habituation paradigm to examine whether 7-month-old infants could categorize rhythmic and melodic patterns on the basis of the underlying meter, which was implied from event and accent frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants discriminated duple and triple classes of rhythm o...

Recent evidence suggests that music-based movement (MbM) therapy may be a promising intervention to improve gait and gait-related activities in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, because it naturally combines cognitive movement strategies, cueing techniques, balance exercises and physical activity while focussing on the enjoyment of moving on music instead of the current mobility limitations of...

Introduction Fetal movement started at the 7th weeks of pregnancy and by the end of pregnancy will gradually be perfect and harmonious. Near-term fetuses can discriminate acoustic features, such as frequencies and spectra, and process complex auditory streams. In this study, we aimed to evaluate fatal movement in response to music and vibration stimulation. Materials and Methods This study is a...

Most people have no diiculty in picking out the beat in a piece of music, and even if they cannot deene what it is they have detected, they can tap their feet in time with the music. This ability is called beat induction. A more diicult task, which we call rhythm recognition, involves uncovering the hierarchical structure of the timing relationships in the music, at a higher level than the freq...


 At the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through eurhythmics Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, a new relationship between music movement was established, which closely involved dance architecture. Our emphasis, here, will be put on transformations related to space, with regard stage reform by Adolphe Appia, Dalcroze’s friend collaborator. It is Appia’s drawings, Rhythmic Spaces, made 1909...

Rhythmic grouping and discrimination is fundamental to music. When compared to the perception of pitch, rhythmic abilities in animals have received scant attention until recently. In this experiment, four pigeons were tested with three types of auditory rhythmic discriminations to investigate their processing of this aspect of sound and music. Two experiments examined a meter discrimination in ...