What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? (2024)

Summary

ProcedureInformed consentAll participants provided informed consent in accordance with the Ethics Council of the Max Planck Society (protocols 2017_12 and 2020_11), the Columbia University Institutional Review Board (protocol IRB-AAAR3726), the University of Western Ontario Health Science Research Ethics Board (protocol 108477), the KAIST Institutional Review Board (protocol IRB-KH2017-15), Durham University (Music Department Ethics Committee, February 2018), the Bogazici University Social Sciences Human Research Ethics Committee (protocol SBB-EAK 2017/1) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (protocol 1209005242R006). All participants received compensation for their involvement, the amount of which was consistent with the minimum wage regulations of their respective countries. We obtained verbal consent to publish images of participants and musicians.Overview of procedureThe experiment measured iterated reproduction (sometimes referred to as serial reproduction or iterated learning38,39) of rhythms. The participants were instructed to synchronize their finger tapping to a repeating auditory stimulus presented over headphones. In previous work26 we found that synchronization to an ongoing rhythm produced similar results to an alternative task in which participants heard a pattern and then tapped a reproduction from memory. However, we found empirically that synchronization was easier to explain to participants and for this reason opted to use it for this cross-cultural study. They first completed a short training session (about 10 minutes long) familiarizing them with the apparatus and task (described below). The main experiment consisted of a series of trials, each of which contained five iterations.On each trial we sampled a random seed uniformly from the triangular rhythm space, corresponding to a three-interval rhythm (s1, s2, s3). We then generated a sequence of clicks from the seed by repeating th...