Music Perception: Investigating musical meter processing with pupillometry

When music plays, people often tap their feet to the rhythm of the song. Rhythm moves us physically and emotionally, being responsible for many of the aesthetic, therapeutic, and social benefits attributed to music. Perceiving rhythm entails a capacity to grasp the temporal patterning of accented and unaccented beats, i.e. the metric structure. In this project we aim to establish a novel approach to meter perception that relies on pupil dilation measurement in response to meter violations, and to examine proximate and ultimate mechanisms of meter perception. To map the demands for executive control needed to process different metric structures we examine the effect of attention allocation on metric perception. To further our understanding of how meter perception has evolved, we test if meter violations are equally well detected in auditory and visual rhythms.