Tempo and walking speed with music in the urban

The study explored the effect of music on the temporal aspects of walking behavior in a real outdoor urban setting. First, spontaneous synchronization between the beat of the music and step tempo was explored. The effect of motivational and non-motivational music (Karageorghis et al., 1999) on the walking speed was also studied. Finally, we investigated whether music can mask the effects of visual aspects of the walking route environment, which involve fluctuation of walking speed as a response to particular environmental settings. In two experiments, we asked participants to walk around an urban route that was 1.8 km in length through various environments in the downtown area of Hradec Kralove. In Experiment 1, the participants listened to a musical track consisting of world pop music with a clear beat. In Experiment 2, participants were walking either with motivational music, which had a fast tempo and a strong rhythm, or with non-motivational music, which was slower, nice music, but with no strong implication to movement. Musical beat, as well as the sonic character of the music listened to while walking, influenced walking speed but did not lead to precise synchronization. It was found that many subjects did not spontaneously synchronize with the beat of the music at all, and some subjects synchronized only part of the time. The fast, energetic music increases the speed of the walking tempo, while slower, relaxing music makes the walking tempo slower. Further, it was found that listening to music with headphones while walking can mask the influence of the surrounding environment to some extent. Both motivational music and non-motivational music had a larger effect than the world pop music from Experiment 1. Individual differences in responses to the music listened to while walking that were linked to extraversion and neuroticism were also observed. The findings described here could be useful in rhythmic stimulation for enhancing or recovering the features of movement performance

Walking on music

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Auto-correlation and entrainment in the synchronous reproduction of musical pulse: developments in childhood

In 1999, Van Noorden and Moelants postulated a resonance around 2 Hz in the human perceptual system to explain the range of tempi in which one can perceive a pulse or beat in music. In this paper, the question how this resonance develops in childhood is addressed: Is the resonance already present in young children? Is it at the same tempo range and is it weaker or stronger than in adults? To answer these questions an experiment was performed on how well children between the ages of 3 and 11 years (N=421), can synchronise their tapping to the beat of common children’s songs with a tempo of 80 to 160 beats per minute. To make sure that even the youngest children could understand the task an avatar tapping along with the pulse of the music was projected during part of each song. To prevent that the children would feel alone in front of the experimenters, which can be a problem for the youngest ones, they did the tapping in groups of 4. The seating had two conditions: seeing their peers and not seeing their peers. Children aged 3 and 4 can only tap in a narrow range around 2 Hz. They can adapt their tapping tempo to musical tempi faster but not to musical tempi slower than their spontaneous tempo. This behaviour can be modelled as a kicked rotator. Their phase synchronisation is very weak. Between the ages of 4 and 7 children expand the range in which they can synchronise, from a little faster, but primarily towards much slower tempi. This supports a resonance model for pulse perception and production in which the characteristic frequency, near 2 Hz, remains the same, but in which the damping of the resonance increases with age, even up to critical damping. Also, the phase of tapping changes with the tempo according to a resonance model. Seeing their peers helped the children of 4 to 6 years old to perform better on the tapping task, children of 8 to 9 performed worse, especially the boys. Boys also start a bit later with the improvement of the tapping variance than the girls do. Besides the synchronisation of their tapping to the music the children keep also track of the tapping of the other children in their group. They sometimes entrain better to each other than they synchronise to the music. The auto-correlation of their inter-tap intervals at delay 1 changes from positive to negative between 4 and 7 years of age

Judgement of valence of musical sounds by hand and by heart, a machine learning paradigm for reading the heart

The intention of the experiment is to investigate whether different sounds have influence on heart signal features in the situation the observer is judging the different sounds as positive or negative. As the heart is under (para) sympathetic control of the nervous system this experiment could give information about the processing of sound stimuli beyond the conscious processing of the subject. As the nature of the influence on the heart signal is not known these signals are to be analysed with AI/machine learning techniques. Heart rate variability (HRV) is a variable derived from the R-R interval peaks of electrocardiogram which exposes the interplay between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. In addition to its uses as a diagnostic tool and an active part in the clinic and research domain, the HRV has been used to study the effects of sound and music on the heart response; among others, it was observed that heart rate is higher in response to exciting music compared with tranquilizing music while heart rate variability and its low-frequency and high-frequency power are reduced. Nevertheless, it is still unclear which musical element is related to the observed changes. Thus, this study assesses the effects of harmonic intervals and noise stimuli on the heart response by using machine learning. The results show that noises and harmonic intervals change heart activity in a distinct way; e.g., the ratio between the axis of the ellipse fitted in the Poincare plot increased between harmonic intervals and noise exposition. Moreover, the frequency content of the stimuli produces different heart responses, both with noise and harmonic intervals. In the case of harmonic intervals, it is also interesting to note how the effect of consonance quality could be found in the heart response