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Figure 6. Vestibular information has an influence over rhythm perception.
were presented to infants while they were bounced on every second or every third beat. On the basis of a head-turn prefer- ence procedure, researchers were able to conclude that when the infants were bounced on every second beat, they were coding the ambiguous rhythm in duple form and when they were bounced on every third beat, they coded the rhythm in triple form (see tinyurl.com/wwry2qu for an audio example). A follow-up experiment in the same study showed that blind- folding infants mitigated but did not eliminate the effect, which confirms that the contribution to rhythm perception was at least partially influenced by the vestibular system.
These effects of auditory-vestibular integration appear to persist into adulthood. In one study, adults were trained to bounce in duple or triple time while listening to an ambigu- ous rhythm. A subsequent listening test revealed that adults were more likely to identify an auditory version of the rhythm with accented beats that matched their bouncing experience as more similar than a version whose accents did not match (Phillips-Silver and Trainor, 2007).
Going Forward
This article has reviewed evidence to suggest that our percep- tion of music involves more than just sound. Although the majority of hearing individuals will focus on sound as the core of music experience, it would seem that a more inclusive and nuanced consideration of music is possible when taking a multisensory perspective involving the integration of sensory inputs from touch, sight, and balance. There is growing inter- est in the experience of music by deaf and hard-of-hearing
individuals. Indeed, the majority of individuals in the deaf community report engagement in musical activities (Darrow, 1993). It would be worthwhile for future research to consider multisensory presentations of musical stimuli that minimize differences in perception across listeners of varying hearing ability. In addition, given the multisensory contributions to music, it would seem that it is quite possible to train aspects of music listening using a combination of auditory and nonaudi- tory inputs. Future research should consider which individuals
would benefit most from multisensory approaches to training (Glick and Sharma, 2017).
Acknowledgments
Parts of this article have been adapted from a chapter by Frank Russo (2019). The sketches in Figures 1, 4, 5, and 6 were cre- ated by Oliver Banyard. The diagrams in Figures 2 and 3 were produced by Fran Copelli with the assistance of Sean Gilmore.
References
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