“When do we get into the cultural rhythm?” A study on the effects of music-cultural perceptual narrowing.

Rhythmic abilities are a fundamental aspect of daily life. Rhythm offers a predictable sequence of time intervals and accents that individuals can synchronize their actions to, enabling one to learn a language, communicate with others, move from one place to another, and synchronize movements to music. Syncing body movements with music, whether through dance or merely an individual response to music, is a common human behavior (Patel et al., 2005). But synchronization, though seemingly effortless, requires the complex integration of perceptual and sensorimotor skills. In moving to music, a beat must first be extracted and then a rhythmic motor response is integrated into that metrical framework (Ilari, 2014). But all over the world, metrical and rhythmic structures differ (Kalender et al., 2013). Hence, an individual’s perception and processing of rhythm are shaped by the unique rhythmic characteristics of the musical culture in which they are deeply ingrained. Studies have shown that individuals of various ages and cultural backgrounds experience a phenomenon known as music-cultural perceptual narrowing (e.g., Lynch et al., 1990; Lynch & Eilers, 1992; Hannon & Trehub, 2005a,b; Hannon & Trainor, 2007). Individuals initially exhibit sensitivity to a diverse range of perceptual structures that narrow down through exposure to the specific characteristics of their musical culture, thus leading to reduced sensitivity to less conventional structures. This study explores the effect of this phenomenon on movement-to-music synchronization, putting to question whether (i) culture-specific perceptual narrowing influences how infants spontaneously move in response to music samples with meters that are either present in their day-to-day experiences with music or absent from it, and whether these responses are (ii) modulated by daily exposure to, i.e. training with, a specific rhythmic pattern, which was either native to the infants’ culture or non-native. Italian infants aged 6 to 24 months and their parents, who were mainly exposed to music with isochronous simple meters, were presented with songs of both simple (4/4) and complex (7/8) meters and their motor behavior as a response to these songs were analyzed. Subsequently, they were invited to participate in a month-long musical training to either a song of 4/4 or 7/8 meter. They were then asked to return to the same experimental setting and tasked to do the same thing as the first experimental session. Preliminary analysis of infants’ motor behavior during auditory stimuli exposure suggests individual differences in motor responses, potential changes in correlations between arm and leg movements, and consistent high levels of synchronization. This thesis will first review existing literature on musicality, music processing, music-cultural perceptual narrowing, and sensorimotor synchronization (Chapter 1), then detail the research methods and materials (Chapter 2). Preliminary results will be presented (Chapter 3), and the theoretical and educational implications of these findings for our understanding of music-motor synchrony and future research directions will be detailed (Chapter 4).