Abstract
Rhythm perception has long been studied through sensorimotor synchronisation tasks involving finger tapping, which have revealed much about temporal prediction and entrainment. However, such paradigms provide limited ecological validity. In everyday musical engagement, synchronisation often occurs through full-body movement. Moreover, timing mechanisms have been found to differ between discrete gestures like tapping and continuous movements such as swaying or bouncing, suggesting partially distinct neural substrates. Importantly, activation of the vestibular system—such as through head or torso motion—appears to drive beat perception.These findings underscore the need to study spontaneous, ecologically valid movement to better understand rhythm perception in natural contexts.
In this presentation, I chart a trajectory from traditional tapping paradigms to more naturalistic studies of music-induced movement, focusing on full-body responses captured via optical motion tracking. This shift introduces analytical challenges, including continuous dynamics, high dimensionality, nonstationarity, and hierarchical temporal structure. I review methodological developments for addressing these issues, including techniques for simplifying complex movement data to obtain spatiotemporal movement features that underpin rhythmic alignment. I present empirical findings demonstrating how different body parts reflect distinct metrical levels, and how musical features such as pulse clarity and spectral flux influence synchronisation patterns across the body.
While previous approaches have focused on encoding—modelling how features of the musical stimulus are reflected in movement patterns—an alternative is to use decoding to test whether movement contains sufficient information to infer properties of the music itself. I present recent work on decoding musical metre directly from movement, using multidimensional movement data modelled with regularised regression. This approach reveals that beat-phase information can be reliably extracted across multiple metrical levels, enabling quantification of phase locking and exposing individual differences in the embodiment of rhythm. It also opens avenues for sonification, interactive systems, rehabilitation, and performance.
Bio
Petri Toiviainen received the degrees of MSc in theoretical physics in 1987 and PhD in musicology in 1996, both at the University of Jyv?skyl?, Finland. Since 2002 he holds the position of Professor of Music at the University of Jyv?skyl?. He has been visiting professor at Cornell University and visiting fellow at Stanford University. During 2008–2013, he was the head of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research, located at the universities of Jyv?skyl? and Helsinki. In 2014–18 he held an Academy Professorship granted by the Research Council of Finland. In 2022–2029 he leads the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain. His research interests include music and movement, music processing in the brain, and music information research.