Subject: Re: Rhythm perception From: "Michael C. Brady" <mbrady(at)FLUIDBASE.COM> Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 04:22:09 -0500I ran an experiment a few years ago where I had musicians and non musicians (American native English speakers) simply tap along with a number of basic rhythms. Results were consistent with other findings that: 1) People select isolated beats and beats preceding longer periods of silence as more salient (where they tend to align there taps). 2) Musicians take longer to start tapping and tend to tap at slightly faster rates. They are also more consistent in their tapping behaviors and are more likely to choose to tap in "multi-cycle" patterns. 3) In a few cases, how a rhythm was initiated had some influence on how people tapped along, but for the most part how a rhythm was initiated did not have much to do with selection of tapping behavior. There's much more to it. Here's the poster with the details: http://www.fluidbase.com/vitae/SMPCposter02.html One of these days I would like to run this experiment on people in non-Western cultures and at different tempos. I anticipate language backgrounds will influence these results..