
How the brain perceives rhythm - benbreen
https://news.mit.edu/2017/how-brain-perceives-rhythm-1205
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readymade
Without a more cross-cultural study this falls more into the domain of
cultural bias (still interesting) than what the title suggests. I'd love to
see what the results look like incorporating data from cultures whose musical
traditions are rhythmically complex and better documented. Godfried
Toussaint's work on Euclidean Rhythms
([http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf](http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf))
makes for a pretty convincing survey of "evenly spaced" beat distribution,
albeit sometimes over uneven lengths. This doesn't even get into things like
the polyrhythm and syncopation in much African music or the complex rhythmic
cycles found in Indian percussion.

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kj2413
That's a good point, and we are on it:
[http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2016.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2016.00285/full)
We are working on a follow up in this direction with more cultures. (N.J)

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readymade
Nice! Looking forward to seeing where this leads :)

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pcsanwald
The wording of the summary at the top is hilarious:

A team of neuroscientists has found that people are biased toward hearing and
producing rhythms composed of simple integer ratios — for example, a series of
four beats separated by equal time intervals.

Breaking news: the preponderance of rhythms in 4 and 3 beat patterns in
virtually every music across the globe isn't a freak coincidence.

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photogrammetry
Yep. This article seems like yet another of MIT's attempts to aggrandize its
"scientific reputation" in every field, even when the 'insights' gained are
obvious or non-novel.

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21
Can somebody explain what they mean by 1:1:1? Their description suggests a
four-on-the-floor pattern, like in house music, but I'm not really sure.

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BenDaglish
They're describing the space in between the notes... so 4 equally spaced notes
would have 3 gaps of 1:1:1 . It is indeed a bit confusing, as it says nothing
about the duration of the last note, which to my ears would be an intrinsic
part of the pattern.

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Jill_the_Pill
Yikes that is a lousy notation. How would they designate the Bo Diddley beat:
0.75: 0.75: 0.75: 0.5: 0.5?

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nukmul
or 3:3:3:2:2?

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xtiansimon
I hoped the piece would comment on the role rhythm plays in visual designs. Is
auditory rhythm more "complex"? Are other rhythms favored by the eye?

In auditory perception, rhythm seems very natural and is easily explained. We
find the same term used in visual art, but it's meaning is less intuitive than
"proportion".

I hoped for a moment a scholarly source would include both, although I'm not
surprised. I imagine the complexity of drawing conclusions would cause any
such reseach to be preceived as suspect. meh.

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dizzyfingers
Have you heard of the architect Christopher Alexander? His life's work seems
to be close to what you are describing. I'd highly recommend the 4 volume
series 'The Nature of Order.'

I've always felt that there is a whole other math based explanation to art and
music, that may even bridge the two, hiding in plain site. Alexander is the
only person I've read who has come close to describing this math.

Any body else here know what I mean?

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flycaliguy
Not exactly what you are looking for but... visually speaking, Paul Klee's
notebooks are incredible resources and online as PDFs.

[https://monoskop.org/log/?p=10127](https://monoskop.org/log/?p=10127)

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cel1ne
The brain seem to have a dozen mechanisms for perceiving various types of
rhythm:

[http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/15...](http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/1525/1955.full.pdf)

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veli_joza
In the end, the question in title was not answered. Also, it would be
interesting to see and compare rhythms they came up with.

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delinka
Nit: it's not a question. "How does the brain perceive rhythm?" would be a
question. "How the brain perceives rhythm" is a promise to explain it to us.

However, you are correct: there is no satisfactory explanation here.

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zhemao
Yeah, the only conclusion we find here is that cultures with music that follow
certain beat patterns are biased towards recognizing those beat patterns. Not
exactly surprising.

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agumonkey
They don't talk about what kind of musicians. I quite distrust the notion of
integer rhythms for them. Rubato is non integral, same goes for swing which
constantly shifts the momentum of the beat. In my non researcher mind,
momentum is the closest definition of what rhythm is (and much more telling
than empty space between stimuli)

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dizzyfingers
I agree with your momentum theory but furthermore it seems to also have a
strong synesthetic element. As I mature as a musician these synesthetic
experiences become more vivid while in the midst of making music.

The best unscientific metaphor I can think of to describe it would be like
casting the Patronus Charm from Harry Potter.

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agumonkey
I don't know HP enough to get your analogy. When I'm in flow, music is like
surfing a multi dimensional curved space. If my body isn't tuned enough and
I'm not relaxed enough I lose "sight" of the surface and energy loss occurs,
otherwise you just follow the valleys or hills as you see fit.

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stevehiehn
I taught music for many years. When people can't accurately reproduce a rhythm
it usually means that they simply arent yet capable of reproducing the
pattern. This study suggests that they can reproduce it but are imposing a
bias on it.

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readymade
I mean, what would the priors look like for this dude?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZBmELy1Dc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZBmELy1Dc)

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nerdponx
It still seems like they're keeping to a steady "integer" rhythm, but being
clever about what they fit inside that rhythm.

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pizza
transfer of culture through beat rhythm priors distributions is a pretty neat
idea. _For cultural awareness, choose bayes theorem._ Reminds me of Aumann's
agreement theorem!

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UhUhUhUh
And I'm wondering whether this has something to do with the rhythm of
language... The heart-beat would give the baseline but language would create
different patterns...??

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glup
Last year the lead author was a post-doc in the lab I work in and we discussed
it... Nori and colleagues are certainly interested in how prosodic differences
between languages may affect the priors. But it's probably not going to be a
very straightforward story... the rhythms in languages are considerably more
complex than the ones they find people have a preference for.

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kj2413
Some of our preliminary research about speech rhythm did get to the Current
Biology paper. Figure 6 in the paper uses the method to study prosody of 5
sentences in English. (N.J)

