Synchronization

Cultural Influences

Research on musical synchronization in the humanities has been pursued with a mixture of ethnographic and musicological approaches. Ethnographic work has sought to understand how societal and cultural considerations affect musical synchronization. Research in this tradition uses qualitative methods, including interviews with performers and the analysis of observational data that the researcher obtains by coding events during live performances or in audio and video recordings. Systematic musicology, on the other hand, adopts quantitative approaches that entail the objective measurement of various aspects of recorded performances (sound-onset timing and body movement trajectories) in order to arrive at rich descriptions of behavior related to musical synchronization.

Studies using these approaches have revealed that systematic deviations from strict synchrony between parts played by different individuals (e.g., leader-follower relations, where one part lags behind another) are generally considered desirable in most musical genres and cultures. Such asynchronies give music vitality, rhythmic tension, aesthetic appeal, and can induce the pleasurable urge to move in listeners. “Groove”-based music, including Afro-Cuban percussion music, funk, bebop, cool jazz, and hip-hop, for instance, is characterized by intentional asynchronies of 15 to 30 milliseconds between members of the rhythm section (e.g., bass player and drummer).

The degree of asynchrony that is desirable nevertheless varies across musical traditions. For example, the tight interlocking of parts in African polyrhythm and Balinese gamelan is eschewed in Indian raga, as well as in some Western contemporary Art music and freely improvised music. Such differences are related not only to aesthetic ideals, but also to the social functions that the activity fulfills. In some religious rituals and carnival competitions (e.g., between samba schools), separate groups exert their identity by exhibiting tight within-group coordination while attempting to avoid coordination between groups. The ability to dynamically manipulate the degree of synchrony through a performance is also valued [Page 1088]in some music. Analyses of jazz recordings, for instance, have revealed that soloists often lag behind the ride cymbal on downbeats but synchronize on off-beats, and that improvised performances become more synchronous immediately prior to points at which the “feel” of the music changes.

Psychological Mechanisms

Musical synchronization is underpinned by psychological processes that allow an individual to perceive the rhythm of an external sequence of events, anticipate the timing of upcoming events based on this rhythm, produce rhythmic movement, and coordinate these produced movements with events in the external sequence. There is a venerable tradition of investigating these processes in the disciplines of experimental psychology and human movement science. The bulk of research in this vein employs laboratory tasks that require an individual to synchronize simple movements (e.g., finger taps, drum strikes, or limb oscillations) with repetitive events in auditory, visual, or multimodal (e.g., audiovisual) pacing sequences.

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