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[Torie Crivello]

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The Jazz Oral History Project audio collection consists of 120 oral histories of seminal pre-Swing Era and Swing Era jazz musicians recorded between 1972 and 1983. The JOHP was initiated in 1972 by the Jazz Advisory Panel of the Music Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. Musicians sixty years and older (as well as several younger artists in poor health) were interviewed in depth about their lives and careers. The taped interviews range in length from 5 to 35 hours each and are accompanied by typewritten transcripts. They have been consulted by hundreds of scholars and writers producing articles, books and dissertations, in addition to frequent use by producers of radio and television...more

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Introduction: Musical performance is thought to rely predominantly on event-based timing involving a clock-like neural process and an explicit internal representation of the time interval. Some aspects of musical performance may rely on emergent timing, which is established through the optimization of movement kinematics, and can be maintained without reference to any explicit representation of the time interval. We predicted that musical training would have its largest effect on event-based timing, supporting the dissociability of these timing processes and the dominance of event-based timing in musical performance.

Materials and Methods: We compared 22 musicians and 17 non-musicians on the prototypical event-based timing task of finger tapping and on the typically emergently timed task of circle drawing. For each task, participants first responded in synchrony with a metronome (Paced) and then responded at the same rate without the metronome (Unpaced).

Results: Analyses of the Unpaced phase revealed that non-musicians were more variable in their inter-response intervals for finger tapping compared to circle drawing. Musicians did not differ between the two tasks. Between groups, non-musicians were more variable than musicians for tapping but not for drawing. We were able to show that the differences were due to less timer variability in musicians on the tapping task. Correlational analyses of movement jerk and inter-response interval variability revealed a negative association for tapping and a positive association for drawing in non-musicians only.

Discussion: These results suggest that musical training affects temporal variability in tapping but not drawing. Additionally, musicians and non-musicians may be employing different movement strategies to maintain accurate timing in the two tasks. These findings add to our understanding of how musical training affects timing and support the dissociability of event-based and emergent timing modes.

The production of accurately and precisely timed movement is a key aspect of many activities. Many forms of musical performance, such as drumming in a jazz ensemble, are characterized by mostly discrete movements with explicit start and stop events. This kind of behavior is thought to generally rely on event-based timing, which involves a clock-like neural process and an explicit internal representation of the time interval (Wing and Kristofferson, 1973). In contrast, other activities, such as the laboratory task of repetitive, continuous circle drawing, are characterized by smoothly produced movement and are thought to normally engage emergent timing in which timing can be maintained without reference to any explicit representation of the time interval (Turvey, 1977; Robertson et al., 1999). It has been proposed that event-based and emergent timing are dissociable systems, both cognitively (Zelaznik et al., 2002; Zelaznik and Rosenbaum, 2010; Delignires and Torre, 2011) and neurophysiologically (Spencer et al., 2003). However, the circumstances under which a given timing mode is engaged are less clear, with recent studies showing that tasks typically thought to use event-based timing can exhibit emergent timing behavior and vice versa (Studenka and Zelaznik, 2008; Zelaznik and Rosenbaum, 2010; Delignires and Torre, 2011). Musicians are known to excel at event-based timing tasks (Franěk et al., 1991; Collier and Ogden, 2004; Repp, 2005, 2010; Repp and Doggett, 2007; Bailey and Penhune, 2012) but, to the best of our knowledge, musicians and non-musicians have never been compared on both event-based and emergent timing tasks. It may be the case that some musical performance, such as the movement involved in controlling a violin bow, involves emergent timing and, therefore, the skills gained by musicians via years of practicing timing tasks may improve both event-based and emergent timing. In the present study, we compared musicians and non-musicians on both finger tapping and circle drawing, the prototypical event-based and emergent timing tasks respectively. We predicted that musical training would have its largest effect on event-based timing behavior, supporting the dissociability of these timing processes and the dominance of event-based timing in musical performance, and informing us as to the limits of transferability of musical skill.

The experimental paradigm most often used to study event-based timing is the finger tapping task (Repp, 2005). Participants first tap in synchrony with an auditory metronome (Paced phase); when the metronome stops, they are asked to continue tapping at the same rate (Unpaced phase). Wing and Kristofferson (1973) proposed the classic model of event-based timing for the Unpaced phase of the task, in which participants presumably rely on an internal timing process in the absence of external cues. The model assumes a central stochastic timer operating independently of the motor response and partitions the variability of the inter-response interval (IRI) into timer and motor sources. Timer variability increases linearly with mean IRI while motor variability is independent of the IRI (Wing, 2002). It has also been shown that lesions to lateral cerebellar regions increase timer but not motor variability, while medial cerebellar lesions have the converse effect (Ivry et al., 1988). Overall, there is extensive empirical support for the independence of timer and motor processes in the Wing-Kristofferson model (for full review see Wing, 2002).

The effects of musical expertise on event-based timing have been well studied. Musicians exhibit greater accuracy and less variability in both the Paced and Unpaced phases of the tapping task compared to non-musicians (Franěk et al., 1991; Repp, 2005, 2010; Repp and Doggett, 2007). Collier and Ogden (2004) developed an extension to the Wing-Kristofferson model that accounts for clock drift and showed that musical experience is related to lower motor variance, clock variance and clock drift.

In emergent timing, the target interval has no explicit internal representation. Instead, timing is thought to emerge from the kinematics of the required movements (Turvey, 1977; Robertson et al., 1999). For example, in the case of continuous circle drawing, a kinematic profile will be established after the first few iterations. This may be manifested by minimal cycle-to-cycle variability in acceleration or some other kinematic parameter and will presumably also be evident in the establishment of patterns of physiological measures such as muscle activation in the drawing hand. Timing, which begins as a constraint for the optimization of kinematics, becomes an epiphenomenon or an emergent property of the kinematics once optimization is achieved.

Continuous circle drawing performance has been shown to be similar to finger tapping performance for the initial few cycles only, presumably when kinematic parameters are still being stabilized (Zelaznik et al., 2005). It has also been shown that the temporal variability of intermittent circle drawing is related to that of tapping but not to that of continuous circle drawing, suggesting that differences in timing performance are not due to differences in task complexity (Zelaznik et al., 2002). Furthermore, cerebellar lesions disrupted timing in finger tapping but not circle drawing (Spencer et al., 2003). An fMRI study of discrete versus smoothly produced air tapping found that the cerebellum was not involved in smoothly produced tapping (Spencer et al., 2007). In sum, since the Robertson et al. (1999) studies, a number of other studies have consistently supported the idea of emergent timing as a distinct mode of timing.

In sum, previous research supports the existence of two separable and mutually exclusive timing modes but the conditions under which a specific mode is engaged are not clear. We know that musicians perform better than non-musicians on the event-based finger-tapping task and that musical training focuses largely on discrete movements, although smoothly produced movement may be a component of training depending on instrument type. To the best of our knowledge, musicians have not been compared to non-musicians on both discrete and continuous tasks. In the present experiment, we hypothesized that if event-based and emergent timing modes are dissociable, then musical training should be predominantly associated with superior temporal control in finger tapping. If musicians also perform better than non-musicians on circle drawing, this would suggest that either the two modalities are less separable than previously thought, or that musical training affects both event-based and emergent timing. To test this, we assessed performance on these tasks by measuring variability in the temporal domain, the smoothness of movement in the spatial domain and the relationship between the two.

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