Influence of age and musical experience on timing and intensity variations in reproductions of short musical rhythms

Abstract

Two structuring processes influence the structure of mental representations for musical rhythms: rhythmic grouping and the detection of temporal regularities based on the organisation around an underlying pulse (the metric structure). This paper investigates the influence of age and musical training on the structure of mental representations. Four groups of subjects (adult musicians, adult nonmusicians, 5- and 7-year-old children) listened to short musical rhythms and were asked to reproduce them immediately. Systematic perfonnance variations in time and intensity were measured in order to provide an indication of the way the subjects structured the sequences. The temporal profiles provided evidence for segmentation into rhythmic groups, almost identical for all subjects, indicating the fundamental nature of this process. However, the intensity profiles varied considerably between groups, providing evidence of the importance of musical training (rather than passive acculturation) on the ability to incorporate the metric structure in a mental representation.