The Mind Is a DJ: Rhythmic Entrainment in Beatmatching and Embodied Temporal Processing

In music, rhythmic entrainment occurs when the attention and body movements of listeners, dancers and musicians become synchronized with the beat. This synchronization occurs due to the mechanisms of phase and period correction. Here, I describe what happens to these mechanisms during beatmatching—a central skill in DJing that involves synchronizing the beats of two records on a set of turntables. Via the enactivist approach to the embodied mind, I argue that beatmatching affords a different form of entrainment that requires more conscious control of and embodied operationalization of temporal error correction, and thus provides a vivid model of the embodied distribution of rhythmic entrainment.