title: Integration of auditory and tactile inputs in musical meter perception.
abstract: Musicians often say that they not only hear but also "feel" music. To explore the contribution of tactile information to "feeling" music, we investigated the degree that auditory and tactile inputs are integrated in humans performing a musical meter-recognition task. Subjects discriminated between two types of sequences, "duple" (march-like rhythms) and "triple" (waltz-like rhythms), presented in three conditions: (1) unimodal inputs (auditory or tactile alone); (2) various combinations of bimodal inputs, where sequences were distributed between the auditory and tactile channels such that a single channel did not produce coherent meter percepts; and (3) bimodal inputs where the two channels contained congruent or incongruent meter cues. We first show that meter is perceived similarly well (70-85 %) when tactile or auditory cues are presented alone. We next show in the bimodal experiments that auditory and tactile cues are integrated to produce coherent meter percepts. Performance is high (70-90 %) when all of the metrically important notes are assigned to one channel and is reduced to 60 % when half of these notes are assigned to one channel. When the important notes are presented simultaneously to both channels, congruent cues enhance meter recognition (90 %). Performance dropped dramatically when subjects were presented with incongruent auditory cues (10 %), as opposed to incongruent tactile cues (60 %), demonstrating that auditory input dominates meter perception. These observations support the notion that meter perception is a cross-modal percept with tactile inputs underlying the perception of "feeling" music.
authors.affiliation: The Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA. jhuang7@jhu.edu
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Darik
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Gamble
authors.forename: Kristine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sarnlertsophon
authors.forename: Xiaoqin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hsiao
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000293:Adolescent; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological / Q000502:physiology*; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055698:Touch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014732:Vibration; D055815:Young Adult