Both Mehr et al.'s credible signaling hypothesis and Savage et al.'s music and social bonding hypothesis emphasize the role of multilevel social structures in the evolution of music. Although empirical evidence preferentially supports the social bonding hypothesis, rhythmic music may enable bonding in a way uniquely fitted to the normative and language-based character of multilevel human societies.

Musical rhythm abilities—the perception of and coordinated action to the rhythmic structure of music—undergo remarkable change over human development. In the current paper, we introduce a theoretical framework for modeling the development of musical rhythm. The framework, based on Neural Resonance Theory, explains rhythm development in terms of resonance and attunement, which are formalized using a general theory that includes non-linear resonance and Hebbian plasticity. First, we review the developmental literature on musical rhythm, highlighting several developmental processes related to rhythm (...) perception and action. Next, we offer an exposition of Neural Resonance Theory and argue that elements of the theory are consistent with dynamical, radically embodied and ecological approaches to cognition and development. We then discuss how dynamical models, implemented as self-organizing networks of neural oscillations with Hebbian plasticity, predict key features of music development. We conclude by illustrating how the notions of dynamical embodiment, resonance, and attunement provide a conceptual language for characterizing musical rhythm development, and, when formalized in physiologically informed dynamical models, provide a theoretical framework for generating testable empirical predictions about musical rhythm development, such as the kinds of native and non-native rhythmic structures infants and children can learn, steady-state evoked potentials to native and non-native musical rhythms, and the effects of short-term, long-term, and very-long term learning on music perception-action. (shrink)

Humans possess the ability to extract highly organized perceptual structures from sequences of temporal stimuli. For instance, we can organize specific rhythmical patterns into hierarchical, or metrical, systems. Despite the evidence of a fundamental influence of the motor system in achieving this skill, few studies have attempted to investigate the organization of our motor representation of rhythm. To this aim, we studied—in musicians and non-musicians—the ability to perceive and reproduce different rhythms. In a first experiment participants performed a temporal order-judgment (...) task, for rhythmical sequences presented via auditory or tactile modality. In a second experiment, they were asked to reproduce the same rhythmic sequences, while their tapping force and timing were recorded. We demonstrate that tapping force encodes the metrical aspect of the rhythm, and the strength of the coding correlates with the individual’s perceptual accuracy. We suggest that the similarity between perception and tapping-force organization indicates a common representation of rhythm, shared between the perceptual and motor systems. (shrink)