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Dr. Fiona Manning’s (PhD ’16) latest findings are now in press at Experimental Brain Research. The study examined rhythm perception in percussionists and non-percussionists when finger tapping to a musical beat. Although we previously found percussionists significantly outperform non-percussionists when using a drumstick, here percussionist performance was only slightly better. More importantly, both groups performed better when tapping with sticks than fingers – regardless of musical training. This surprising finding raises interesting questions about past timing studies – which generally use finger tapping alone. Our data came from our lab road trips to PASIC, funded by Dr. Schutz’s Petro Canada Young Investigator Award, and builds on our novel discovery that “moving to the beat” improves rhythm perception. Click here for a preprint of this paper, or click here for more information on our previous work |
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