Where is the beat?
There is a cultural dimension in the perception of beats that can be illustrated by simple cases of people outside a given cultural context misunderstanding the position of the beat in a given musical sequence. Thus it seems that positions of the beat are not completly defined in the physical audio signal, and furthermore that despites widespread hypothesis inspired by Lerdhal and Jackendoff’s theory, positions of the beat are not computed in a uniform way by universal cognitive mechanisms. If one wants to go further in the investigation of the cultural dimension of beats, a simple idea is to ask people to tap to the music. This is done both by ethnomusicologists working in Arom’s tradition, and by cognitivists making experiments in music perception. But it leads to the question of how to prove that people’s tapping does really correspond to the beat? For instance, how to be sure that their tapping is not contrametric? A simple assumption should be that, for physiological reasons related to the balance of the body, beat positions are indicated by the feet movements on the ground of people dancing to the music. However feet movements can be complexe and difficult to record and analyse. These various difficulties all refer to the question “Where is the beat?” (and to more controversial questions such as “What is the beat?” and “Does the beat really exist?”) that will be discussed and illustrated by examples that we have studied during ethnomusicological fieldwork in Madagascar.
presentation slides available here