Question
Is anyone studying the relationship between physical movement and auditory rhythm perception?
Dance comes before language and characterizes only human species (Fitch et al. 2006). What correlate of movement might establish the correlation between physical movement and auditory rhythm? What do you think about hypotheses on the relationship between the vestibular system, locomotion, and heart beat?
All Answers (38)
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I am not able to answer this question, because my research is not focus on this topic.but I think that it should exist some inhernt relationship, you can see that our respiration, heart beat , biological work and rest are all rhythmic,which are naturally too. -
I'm not quite informed about the relationship between the vestibular system, locomotion, and heart beat. But in normal enviroment heart beat is not audible, so only noise and other sound can produce a reaction in balance trough the vestibular reflex like vestibulocollic reflex. It would be interesting study what sound vibration produces in balance, like loud music in a club. -
You might want to check out research done by Jessica Grahn ( http://www.uwo.ca/its/brain/people/grahn_jessica.html ), Jessica Phillips-Silver ( http://www.brams.umontreal.ca/plab/people/phillips-silver_j ) -
If you're looking for a neurological overlap for vestibular, cardiac, and proprioception, you might look at the connections of the posterior insular cortex (vestibular and proprioceptive) with the anterior insula (internal regulatory functions that influence heart rate). Auditory/vestibular overlap is a bit more controversial, but not completely so - there is some evidence for multimodal processing in the dorsolateral frontal cortex, but I'm not sure it relates to the function you are concerned about. Again, there may be some insular connections to auditory regions, but there are also other temporoparietal regions with possible vestibular and auditory overlap as well. The medial geniculate of the thalamus known for auditory processing, contains some ascending vestibular projections, but I couldn't begin to guess if they connect with auditory pathways directly.
Vestibular auditory interactions have not to my knowledge been strongly studied from a perspective perceptual influences of rhythms. It would be interesting to know there is a neurological connection and how it works. -
This is an interesting topic but not about my research. There may be a relationship between physical movement and auditory rhythm perception because dancing usually refers to movement of the body with rhythm. However, this relationship will probably depend on what style of dancing. -
I'd suggest you look at writings on the response of the infant in utero to the mother's heartbeat and (external) rhythms/music, which seems to establish the child's nature as well, perhaps, as balance and locomotive predilection.
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Thanks for all your good suggestion. I agree it can depend on the style of dancing, but they have in common the fact of listen and reproduce a rhythm, in every kind of dancing. The evoultive sense of moving following a sound is also interesting, don't you think? maybe social cohesion and sharing? This topic seem relate to embodied theory of cognition, doesn't it? -
Lu Favoreto and the colleages at Oito Nova Dança by Lu Favoreto in Sao Paulo city. She helds a group of dance, music, performance with sounds, body expression.... -
Here's an awesome paper by a labmate of mine who found that parrots (well at least one) can synchronize body movements to musical rhythm: Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Bregman, M. R., & Schulz, I. (2009). Studying synchronization to a musical beat in nonhuman animals. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169, 459-69. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04581.x (direct link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04581.x ) and here's the parrot's wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_(cockatoo)
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more relevant paper: Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Bregman, M. R., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental evidence for synchronization to a musical beat in a nonhuman animal. Current biology : CB, 19(10), 827-30. Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038 (direct link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038 ) -
This is an important but under-researched area. I think musical hallucinations were crucial to human evolution, underlying development of language, poetry and music when people imitated the hallucinations, and of religion, since a common MH is of angel song, a mystical angel choir heard up above in the heavens . MHs come from the inner ear when in a hypersensitive state from fever, drugs, dehydration, weight loss, shamanic rituals, hyperventilation, etc. They usually start with rhythmical tinnitus driven by the heartbeat. The auditory and vestibular systems interact in the ear, so higher parts of the nervous system are not needed for this. Deaf children who also have a defective vestibular system are late to walk. I would not be surprised if they also had resultant psychological problems as well, but I do not know if anyone has compared those congenitally deaf children with or without vestibular systems for such secondary disorders. Autistic infants also have auditory and vestibular dysfunction.
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which is really good concept....
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I don't know much about this, but from a speech production standpoint, it might be useful to check out work by Alice Turk and colleagues. Or to email Alice directly (she's quite approachable). :) http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~turk/ -
There is a musical training program called the Dalcroze Method (Eurythmics) that is based on linking physical movement to auditory rhythms to improve musicality. It is not a research program but it suggests that Dalcroze was capitalizing on something inherently connected in humans. -
In the movie: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
you can observe parrots dancing.
Zbikowski, L.M., 2010, Music and Movement: A view from Cognitive Science,
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/zbikowski/pdfs/Zbikowski_Music_and_movement_draft.pdf -
The part of the human that control movement is probably central to the production of music and so we should not be surprise if music is responded to by movements. There is a lot of evidence supporting that the first forms of language where mediated by body movements. I believe that the mathematical relationships in the rythmic structure of musical sound are the same relationships involved in the timing for the control of the body. This hypothesis would imply that music creation becomes similar to choreography and sign language creation.
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Dance to enjoy, speak to hear myself talk. Sure, the two are intimately related, but there is a value in the act of dance that is not the same as speech.
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Well taken. The point was that while there are connections between music and language, and speech and dance (see Williams syndrome), there are differences between the production of speech and dance. There are also differences in the affects of participating in speech and dance.
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Freya, you mentioned earlier that one should be cautious about reducing dance to movement in response to sound specifically in humans. I have always wondered about the ancient Eastern movement such as the 'Tai Chi'. Could this be a good example in this case, since there is no music involved and it's purely spiritual?
For your other questions, could the Eastern transcendental dance by the sufis which combines dance with music and the rhythmic sounds of deep breathing (in sync with the heart beats) be an example?
On another note at the start of your topic, you say that, "Dance comes before language and characterizes only human species", I couldn't go beyond that very first sentence. Is this specification b/c although animals dance too but unlike humans who probably started dancing as a way of socializing/rituals, animals dance only for sex (I don't mean it in a perverted way). So could sex be the the dotted line here connecting the pieces together?
On another note in a completely different approach, the combination of the three: movement/dance + music + auditory/verbal in a rhythmic way could be very political for instance in the way it has or could be used in the military (or pervasive propaganda). -
My mentor, Jerome Rosner, professor emeritus at the UHouston School of Optometry, presented a research report at a Washington, DC conference in 1969 entitled "Three Interrelated Functions" in which they surprisingly found a fairly strong correlation between ocular accommodation and rhythmical clapping on a test from the Rosner Perceptual Survey (available from the ERIC datadase as his Working Paper #47). They found a reduced ability to respond to a set of 1.25D flipper lenses, as I recall.
They promised to publish it, but never did. I think I'll put up a page of unpublished but powerful papers like that on my website....Jack Dunsing, a long-since retired pyshology professor from UYoungstown, did a study of perceptual-motor skills and reading achievement at about the same time and noted that they were surprised to find a (previously unreported) correlation between rhythmical motor activities and reading achievement. I talked to him the week he was retiring, and he said they never published the findiings (I have a mimeographed copy of the paper -- plus he sent me his files!!)
And, Pat Churchland reported that her husband Paul had found a 40-cps rhythm permeating the brain ("Like all the cells were jumping up and down together," which surprised them), but I never read more about it after the feature article reporting that.
More later, perhaps. -
is this interesting for You?
Music perception and movement deterioration in Huntington's disease.
Beste C, Schüttke A, Pfleiderer B, Saft C.
PLoS Curr. 2011 Sep 20;3:RRN1252. -
I've spent some time trying to find that exact paper/authors on PLoS. No go. Can you provide a direct URL?
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There is also some research going on related to human movements and the effect of music. One paper I came along was MacDougall, H. G., & Moore, S. T. (2005). Marching to the beat of the same drummer: the spontaneous tempo of human locomotion. Journal of applied physiology (Bethesda, Md : 1985), 99(3), 1164–1173. doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00138.2005. I can remember another one which focussed on the effect of music on running performance. Can look it up if you are interested.
Just today an article came in published in the Journal of strength and conditioning on the effects of self-selected music on strength and fitness parameters.
Cheers
Axel -
Hi. You might find interesting works by Michael Thaut, from Colorado. He studies motor facilitation by auditory stimuli, and music in patients (Parkinson's, Stroke...). In our lab we have also some works on effect of rhythm on gait in Parkinson's, (2010, 2008...), those can be downloaded from my profile.
I hope this helps -
im coming in, or back in, on this belatedly. i see a (deleted) response (strangely), which asks about the connection of sex to dance and politics. there is terrific writing about fascist politics, rhythm and movement (although they dont always make those connections transparent); im thinking of the writings of sontag particulary ( 1974?) but also more lately. tell me if you want more references.
i wanted to respond also to the reply about rhythmic response in parrots, because i think we need to distinguish between that and 'dance' as a form kinaesthesia OR spirituality. every creature has rhythm--one has only to watch a sea anenome--in response to external rhythmic stimuli--in this case, the tides or underwater currents. this can be talked about as a 'dance' but it is not what is indicated by discussions of human dance (choreography, spatiality) or even the play of dogs and cats (aggressive stances, chase reflex) which can also look rehearsed (because, in essence, it IS rehearsed behaviour). this is not to say that we should be uninterested in rhythm in other creatures, just exacting with our language. (at the same time, i dont agree with fitch, et al., whom i've also read, because i do think other species dance.) -
While responding the tab closed, so I apologise if this appears twice in different forms. Freya, I must have been unclear. On the contrary, I intended to differentiate the higher cortical realms of dance from rhythmic, impulsive, reflexive and repetitive movement. My own study on cognitive enhancement in people with intellectual and physical disabilities, primarily through choreography, resulted in gains in memory, social behaviour and self-esteem, to name only a few benefits. I initiated that study in response to prevailing attitudes towards people with cognitive disabliites. In a clinical capacity as a dance/movement therapist I strongly advocate and facilitate dance over occupational and diversional movement with people with intellectual disabiltiies and with people living with dementia (see thread on Aging--to date I have found much more literature on music than dance with the latter population).
It is thrilling to see the interest in this subject. Colleagues and students will want to dig into Neurocognition of Dance (Bläsing et al.). Pablo, no doubt you're familiar with Musicophilia (Sacks)? Finally, there is so much great scholarship that is unknown or recognised, so Merrill: yes, please make such articles available. -
Thank you Kol; I didn't know the reference by Sacks.
I guess one interesting thing is what attribute of music is what makes it interact with the motor system in elderly or disese. Maybe it is just the (pure) rhythm or the melody?. Some previous works on Parkinsonian suggested better interaction with pure tones than with music (Thaut and col), though clearly I prefer listening Another Brick in the Wall than a boring metronome...
Below an effect on motor system of just pure rhythmic tones. Four videos at the end "Supporting Information"
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0009675 -
Pablo, there's quite a lot of writing on Mozart and cognition (hence the CD 'Baby Mozart'). but ive seen Bach and Brahms produce similar responses when working with babies. (I have not run MRIs or any other kind of medical diagnostic test.) I think it's a more complex question than melody or rhythm, and that the 'or' is part of the problem: melody includes not only pitch and length but also tonality and frequency (even in percussion instruments); rhythm can be multi-vocal and melodic (as in Africa).
Your article on Parkinsonian patients (thank you!) says that loss of cadence is implicated in FOG. (I'm simplifying the actual statement.) It is very interesting to see (in citation) that using a metronome as a cadence instrument for the corridor walk is unproductive. So how the cadence is produced or transmitted is also significant.
Forgive my naivety; this is not my population. But in work with people living with dementia I've seen that music that evokes a response in ME is more likely to score with the elderly. So I've brought in Amy Winehouse, Rio Lounge and David D'or with great effect. Music and memory are associative. A metronome holds no emotional value for me, and perhaps this is true for those tested as well?
Popular Answers
(edit)
more relevant paper: Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Bregman, M. R., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental evidence for synchronization to a musical beat in a nonhuman animal. Current biology : CB, 19(10), 827-30. Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038 (direct link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038 )