2 - Perception of Rhythm

Summary

Music is an essentially temporal experience, and the temporal structures by which music unfolds are critical to listeners’ aesthetic, emotional, and behavioral responses. Music is perceived at multiple related timescales, from notes to measures to phrases. In our usage, rhythm refers to the absolute timing of individual notes or sounds, beat refers to the perceived regular pulse that listeners tend to feel and synchronize their movements with, and meter is the repeating cycle of beats, often a pattern of variable salience (composed of stronger and weaker beats). The beat tends to be steady or theoretically isochronous (evenly spaced), although human performance of music inevitably adds temporal variability, via both musical intention (e.g., rubato, expressively stretching and compressing the beat rate) and natural performance dynamics (e.g., due to the limits of temporal precision of human movements). Importantly, beat and meter perception can differ between listeners, relating to factors such as musical context, expertise, cultural experience, or cognitive processes such as attention.