Feeling the beat: Effect of short-term audiovisual training

Details

Supervisors

Nozaradan, Sylvie ; Guerin, Ségolène

Faculty

Faculté des sciences de la motricité

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de la motricité, orientation générale, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

enMusic tends to make people dance. Even in syncopated rhythms, beat periodicities can be flexibly perceived depending on the culture, musical experience and body movement. This study examined the role of audiovisual training on the behavioural and neural representations of periodic beats using an ambiguous rhythmic pattern. Fourty participants were engaged in three sessions: two sessions of listening combined with hand clapping task at the beginning and the end of the experiment (recorded with EEG), and an audiovisual training session during which a video clip of a dancer dancing on a drum sound (three- vs. four-beat structure) was displayed to the participant. To investigate the effect of training type, a comparison between our data and those of Guérin et al. (2024)’s study (i.e., motor training) was also performed. Our results show that neural responses were not enhanced after the audiovisual training. However, behavioural responses seem enhanced in both conditions after an audiovisual training. Motor and audiovisual training comparison shows no significant effect of group (audiovisual vs. motor) but an effect of condition (three- vs. four-beat metre) for both EEG and behavioural data. We conclude that a short-term audiovisual training is not sufficient to stabilise a beat interpretation but is as effective as a short-term motor training for the participants to mobilise the learned beat-rhythm association, and guide movement timing when they are asked to move to the same musical rhythm.