I n a study of tempo perception , L ondon , Burger, Thompson, and Toiviainen (2016) presented participants with digitally ‘‘tempo-shifted’’ R&B songs (i.e., sped up or slowed down without otherwise altering their pitch or timbre). They found that while participants’ relative tempo judgments of original versus altered versions were correct, they no longer corresponded to the beat rate of each stimulus. Here we report on three experiments that further probe the relation(s) between beat rate, tempo-shifting, beat salience, melodic structure, and perceived tempo. Experiment 1 is a replication of London et al. (2016) using the original stimuli. Experiment 2 replaces the Motown stimuli with disco music, which has higher beat salience. Experiment 3 uses looped drum patterns, eliminating pitch and other cues from the stimuli and maximizing beat salience. The effect of London et al. (2016) was replicated in Experiment 1 , present to a lesser degree in Experiment 2 , and absent in Experiment 3 . Experiments 2 and 3 also found that participants were able to make tempo judgments in accordance with BPM rates for stimuli that were not tempo-shifted. The roles of beat salience, melodic structure, and memory for tempo are discussed, and the TAE as an example of perceptual sharpening is considered.

T he current study explores how individuals ' tendency to empathize with others (trait empathy) modulates interaction and social entrainment in dyadic dance in a free movement context using perceptual and computationally derived measures. Stimuli consisting of 24 point-light animations were created using motion capture data selected from a sample of 99 dyads, based on self-reported trait empathy. Individuals whose Empathy Quotient (EQ) scores were in the top or bottom quartile of all scores were considered to have high or low empathy, respectively, and twelve dyads comprised of four high-high, four low-low, and four high-low empathy combinations were identified. Animations of these dyads were presented to 33 participants, who rated the degree of interaction and movement similarity for each stimulus. Results showed a significant effect of empathy combination on perceived interactivity and perceived similarity. High-low stimuli were rated as significantly more interactive than either high-high or low-low stimuli, while high-high stimuli were rated as significantly less similar than high-low and low-low. Dyads’ period-locking, bodily orientation and amount of hand movement were all significantly correlated with rated amount of interaction, while rated similarity only related significantly to period-locking. Results suggest that period-locking is important for social entrainment to be perceived, but that other signals such as bodily orientation and hand movement also signal social entrainment during free dance movement.

Listening to music makes us move in various ways. Several factors can affect the characteristics of these movements, including individual factors and musical features. Additionally, music-induced movement may also be shaped by the emotional content of the music, since emotions are an important element of musical expression. This study investigates possible relationships between emotional characteristics of music and music-induced, quasi-spontaneous movement. We recorded music-induced movement of 60 individuals, and computationally extracted features from the movement data. Additionally, the emotional content of the stimuli was assessed in a perceptual experiment. A subsequent correlational analysis revealed characteristic movement features for each emotion, suggesting that the body reflects emotional qualities of music. The results show similarities to movements of professional musicians and dancers, and to emotion-specific nonverbal behavior in general, and could furthermore be linked to notions of embodied music cognition. The valence and arousal ratings were subsequently projected onto polar coordinates to further investigate connections between the emotions of Russell’s (1980) circumplex models and the movement features