Dr. Jessica Phillips-Silver (BRAMS, International center for music and sound research, Montreal) hold a seminar on "Are we born to dance ? Using dance to study beat perception and
production in music" on 11 Januray 2010.
"Entrainment in music is the ubiquitous, spontaneous behavior of internalizing the pulse of music, or ‘feeling the beat’. People of all ages and cultural or musical backgrounds often demonstrate entrainment by moving their bodies to the beat of the music, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, and behavioral and neuroscientific evidence are consistent with the idea that this behavior reflects integration of multiple sensory systems. The present study has three goals. First, we document the ability of adults in the general population to synchronize their body movement with real dance music. We use a motion capture device to measure full-body movement, and demonstrate that adults are highly precise: at least as precise as they are at tapping. Second, we measure the ability of the same people to judge whether a model is dancing in time to the same music. We use a novel perceptual asynchrony detection paradigm, in which subjects judge short, audiovisual movies of the dancer that are either synchronous or asynchronous to varying degrees. We show that people are proficient at this activity, though their performance on this perceptual task is less precise than on the production task. Third, we report a case of an individual with self-reported rhythm problems, who is significantly impaired on both tasks. We conclude that beat-finding in perception and action is a widespread ability that does not rely on special training. However, there exist rare cases of individuals who are impaired on beat perception and synchronization in the context of music. We explore the present case as a new form of congenital amusia, specific to beat perception and synchronization: beat deafness. We will discuss the efficacy and the ecological validity of this and other studies that aim to characterize entrainment in musical perception and action."
This seminar will hold in Auditoire De Visscher (ICP) at 5 pm.
For more information, contacts are #Sylvie Nozaradan:sylvie.nozaradan@uclouvain.be# & #Marcus Missal:marcus.missal@uclouvain.be#