Metro-rhythmical experience in dance and music as the participatory cross-modal syntactic processing

Abstract

Disciplinary background A. Biomusicology: Music is an example of the Humboldt system (Merker, 2002) which consists of a restricted number of units organized according to particular rules. The arrangement of these units is often called ‘syntax’ and it necessitates a special form of neural processing (Patel, 1998). The neural processing of musical syntax is based on two types of analysis (i.e. spectral and temporal analyses) (Zatorre, Belin, & Penhune, 2002) which result in the experience of musical pitch and rhythm hierarchies. As a rhythm hierarchy is experienced as a periodical scheme of accents (meter) that occurs when we listen to a succesion of rhythm measures (rhythm) the hierarchical patterns in this domain can be called ‘metro-rhythmical patterns.’ However, while the hierarchical schemes of discrete pitch patterns seem to be unique to music, the metro-rhythmical patterns can be produced both in the auditory and motor domains by the means of vocalizations and body movements respectively. As the result, the metro-rhythmical part of musical structure can be interpreted by the means of body movements in dance (Sievers, Polansky, Casey, & Wheatley, 2013). Disciplinary background B. Psychology of Music: The experience of rhythm hierarchies, being pre-conceptual and motor in nature, became the cross-modal mental reference of syntactic relations as the result of the evolution of cortical and subcortical interactions. This view is supported by the facts that the experience and recognition of metro-rhythmical patterns does not necessitate any awareness of conceptual properties, and that the auditory-motor synchronization – the ability that is crucial for the production of rhythm syntax, is based on cortico-subcortical loops (Li et al., 2015). Abstract Music and dance are vital components of human togetherness. The main aim of this presentation is to show that our sense of participation in dance and music is based on the syntactic processing of metro-rhythmical and pitch hierarchies. In the case of a metro-rhythmical