Can’t clap to a beat? How rhythmically challenged people experience and strategize keeping time to music

Abstract

While the phenomenon of beat-deafness has been explored in clinical contexts, few studies have investigated how rhythmically challenged people experience the act of keeping time with music. Task-based semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight participants who self-identified as being unable to clap in time to a beat. Participants were asked to keep time with a gradated battery of musical stimuli using both claps and alternative gestures (e.g. head nodding, swaying) and to articulate their timekeeping experience and strategies. Analysis reveals three core themes: (a) an apparent disconnect between the act of identifying the beat and the physical act of clapping, (b) variation in strategies for keeping time depending on the type of musical example (i.e., whether the beat was explicitly played by a percussive instrument or not), and (c) variation in the ease of coordination and listening experience when a movement other than clapping was used to keep time. Despite being small in scale, this qualitative study sheds light on some of the underlying strategies and processes involved in beat abstraction and keeping time to music, informing options for the musical training of rhythmically challenged people.

Keywords

auditory perception/cognition rhythm synchronization entrainment beat perception

The ability to engage in rhythmic activity generally involves some degree of sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) or entrainment: the act of being able to coordinate rhythmic movements such as clapping, tapping, or swaying in time to an external rhythm. Keeping time in this way involves the coordination of a variety of complex cognitive processes, such as perceiving repeated structural regularities in the music (sequencing), perceiving a regular pulse (beat induction), making temporal predictions about and structuring (anticipating) incoming sounds, and producing movements in synchrony with this inferred beat (Repp & Su, 2013). Despite its apparent universality, a small proportion of people, often described as having “no rhythm” or “two left feet,” have considerable difficulty detecting and/or synchronizing to an external beat in music. In Phillips-Silver et al.’s (2011) study of this phenomenon, the authors introduce the case of Mathieu, a “beat-deaf” individual who showed wildly inaccurate motor synchronization to a beat, as well as poor beat perception and spared pitch processing (see also Palmer et al., 2014).

Since its first documentation, “beat-deafness” has mainly been diagnosed and studied in clinical contexts, using sensorimotor synchronization tests, such as the BAASTA (Dalla Bella et al., 2017) or H-BAT (Fujii & Schlaug, 2013). These studies are based on a finger tapping paradigm that has been used to assess sensorimotor timing skills. Participants are instructed to tap their index finger to a pacing stimulus—a sequence of equally spaced tones—and are evaluated based on their accuracy in synchronizing to each pulse. However, such tests may be missing essential information that can better characterize why it is that some people have trouble keeping time to music. Firstly, they use tapping as the sole means of detecting synchronization, whereas Phillips-Silver et al. (2011) and Tranchant et al. (2016) show that a variety of bodily movements can provide an alternative measure of rhythmic entrainment due to the way that the body integrates vestibular, proprioceptive, and auditory information without requiring fine-motor coordination. Secondly, whereas Phillips-Silver et al. (2011) demonstrate that participants classified as “beat-deaf” have trouble finding or “extracting” a beat from musical excerpts, the diagnostic tests provide stimuli that tend to pre-extract the beat from their musical contexts, since pacing stimuli, even if varied in durationality between pulses or in tempo, ultimately decontextualize the beat from music. As such, tests used to diagnose the clinical condition of “beat-deafness” are not able to fully assess whether the inability to synchronize with an external beat is related to the enactment of specific timekeeping movement forms or how qualities in music may influence beat perception. In categorizing beat-deafness as a strictly binary condition, such tests also offer little insight in understanding the range of experiences and competencies of people who may be more broadly defined as being rhythmically challenged or having difficulty keeping time to music.

Beat perception as dependent on musical context

As noted above, prior research on sensorimotor synchronization in the general population is grounded in the study of finger tapping along to an external, often computer-controlled beat. The most influential model of beat perception is by Wing and Kristofferson (1973) who propose a classic dual-process model with an internal timekeeper issuing tap commands and peripheral processes executing these commands into action, separating the act of perceiving the beat from that of response execution (i.e., motor implementation). Further research on sensorimotor synchronization has not overturned this dual-process model, but rather elaborated on (a) some of the mechanisms of the internal timekeeping component, such as the nature of representations of time and some of the memory and decision mechanisms necessary to determine the beat (e.g., Collyer et al., 1994; Coull, 2004), as well as (b) error-correcting mechanisms (Repp, 2001) and (c) neural mechanisms underlying beat perception and synchronization (Large & Snyder, 2009; Patel & Iversen, 2014).

Applying Wing and Kristofferson’s (1973) model to explain why some people have trouble clapping in time to music would imply that the issue is centered either on the internal timekeeping mechanism or on the implementation of certain timekeeping movements. However, understanding people’s sense of timekeeping with respect to authentic musical stimuli (i.e., as opposed to metronome beats) requires the additional step of attempting to understand how they are making sense of the music. This is driven by research which suggests that the plethora of structural properties present in a musical sequence (e.g., event timing, event intensity, pitch contour, repetition) can influence subsequent beat induction (Hannon et al., 2004; Jones, 2008). For instance, one of the most important features of music that enables listeners to determine the beat of a piece of music is its rhythm, which describes the arrangement of notes of varying duration that fall within the beat or underlying steady pulse of the music (Fraisse, 1982). Beats are perceptual abstractions from rhythm, which may lead to an endogenous sense of a cyclic pattern of beats, otherwise known as meter, when patterns of sound events are identified (London, 2012). As an example of the importance of musical context, the repetitive distribution of strong and weak beats in music (i.e., metrical accents with different levels of perceptual prominence, accentuated by variations in pitch, intensity, or timbre in the music as well as the grouping pattern) is said to be one of the determinants of musical predictability and hence, musical sense-making and beat induction. Thus, rhythm, by temporally structuring music, is typically used by listeners as a cue to discern an underlying beat (Fitch, 2013; Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983).

To examine why some find it difficult to clap in time to music, it is thus necessary, in addition to diagnostic tests such as the H-BAT, to better understand the processes by which people identify and clap along to the beat from complex, multi-instrumental music (as opposed to pared-down beats). Because making sense of music is an essential component of timekeeping, we wanted to understand participants’ experiences and descriptions of undertaking the action of keeping time. In this, we drew on studies by Bamberger that used students’ descriptions of seemingly intuitive rhythmic actions (clapping, walking, drumming) as a starting point to explore their musical sense-making (Bamberger, 1991/1995).

In this article, we describe a task-based semi-structured interview protocol that was developed to better understand the listening/clapping experiences and strategies of people who self-identified as having trouble clapping in time. We detail some of the themes that arose in participants’ timekeeping strategies, as well as their experiences of keeping time. We first describe the disconnection participants identified between the physical act of clapping and the act of listening to musical examples to identify the beat. We then provide an overview of participants’ subsequent strategies for clapping in time to sets of musical examples where (a) the beat was explicitly marked by a percussive instrument and (b) where there was an absence of a guiding percussive line. We end by comparing participants’ timekeeping experiences with gestures other than clapping (i.e., head nodding, swaying).

Methods

A task-based semi-structured interview protocol was designed to provide insight into participants’ timekeeping experiences and strategies. Participants were first asked a series of questions about their musical experiences, such as whether they enjoyed listening to music, going to concerts, or had ever learnt to play a musical instrument, as well as their motivations for taking part in the study. They were then played the first of a series of musical excerpts and asked to clap in time to it. For this portion of the protocol, a gradated collection of multi-instrument musical stimuli was compiled and arranged from most to least complex in terms of beat salience. Stimuli were ordered according to whether there was (a) an underlying beat explicitly and regularly marked by repeated notes from a percussive instrument, such as a drum (e.g., Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”), (b) a beat that was generated by relations among repeating patterns and motifs in the music but not explicitly played by an instrument (e.g., Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or (c) no obvious beat generated by the music (e.g., non-periodic Gregorian chant music). In choosing appropriate stimuli, care was taken to sample examples from a variety of different musical genres and styles, which all had roughly similar tempo ranges of between 110 and120 bpm. The ordering of the musical excerpts both within and between the three groups was verified through iterative testing with pilot participants. For a full list of musical stimuli and their ordering, which features songs from Group 1, Group 2, and Group 3, see Table 1.

Table 1.

Musical Stimuli Ordered from Least (1) to Most (16) Complex According to Metrical Structure.

Piece	Artist, song title
1	Katie Perry, “Teenage Dream”	Group 1: Music with a beat that is explicitly played by a percussive instrument
2	George Ezra, “Shotgun”
3	Count Basie, “Corner Pocket”
4	Strauss, “Radetzky March”
5	Dave Matthews, “Ants Marching”
6	Vivaldi, “Spring Concerto”	Group 2: Music where the beat is generated by the music
7	Mozart, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
8	Novo Piano, “DANCE”
9	City Girl, “Neon Impasse”
10	Herbie Hancock, “Watermelon Man”
11	Dr. Dre ft. Snoop Dogg, “Nuthin’ but a G thang” (vocals only)
12	Mahler, “Adagietto” from Symphony 5	Group 3: Music where no beat is generated by the music
13	Polovinkin, Seventh Event
14	Olivier Messiaen, Catalogue d’iosseaux
15	Schoenberg, Piano Concerto op. 42
16	Gregorian Chant, “Dies Irae”

Participants were played a 30-s excerpt of the first (i.e., least complex) musical example (1 in Table 1) and were asked to clap in time to it. They were allowed to start clapping at any point in the excerpt they felt comfortable entering on. If they had difficulty clapping in time, they were asked to keep time with the same musical excerpt using a movement other than clapping (with the choice of movement being left up to them). If they were, however, successfully able to clap in time with the stimuli, the process was repeated with a 30- to 60-s extract of the next most complex musical stimuli (i.e., 2 in Table 1) until participants reached an excerpt they had trouble keeping time with. This procedure was carried out for stimuli in Groups 1 and 2. Group 3 excerpts were only played to participants if they had no obvious difficulties with keeping time to the Group 1 and 2 excerpts. See Table 2 to see which musical examples in each group each participant was able to progress up to before keeping time with an alternative movement. The decision was made to primarily study participants’ experiences of clapping (i.e., as opposed to another bodily movement, such as tapping) as it is a common and universal timekeeping mechanism (Brodsky & Sulkin, 2011) that we were sure participants would have had prior experience with.

Table 2.

How Far through the Ordered Musical Excerpts in Each Group Participants Were Able to Reach.

Participant	Group 1					Group 2						Group 3	Alternative clapping gesture
	Music with a beat explicitly played by percussion					Music where a beat is generated by the music (i.e., not explicitly marked by percussion)						Music where no beat is generated
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12-16
1	x	x	x	x	x	x	x*						Bowing an imaginary violin / head nodding
2	x	x	x	x	x	x*							Pen waving
3	x	x	x*			x*							Air conducting
4	x*					x*							Head nodding (up and down)
5	x	x	x	x*		x*							Head swaying (side to side)
6	x	x	x	x	x	x	x*						Tapping on the table with two fingers
7	x	x	x	x		x*							Conducting gesture
8	x	x	x	x*		x	x*						Tapping two fingers together

x indicates a musical example that participants were able to clap along to with ease. x* indicates a musical example that participants struggled to clap with and kept time to using an alternative gesture.

After each attempt at keeping time, participants were asked open-ended questions about their clapping experience, in particular how and what in the music they were listening to and how they decided when to clap. If they were keeping time in a way other than clapping, they were asked what this felt like, and how it felt different to clapping. The interviews were carried out in a friendly and informal manner, with the researchers extending the discussion and asking clarifying questions where required. Finally, participants were invited to move freely to a song of their choice and then reimbursed US$20 for their time. The interviews ranged in length from 36 to 65 min, with a median interview time of 42 min.

Participants were recruited via a self-selection process, through flyers posted around the UC Berkeley campus that solicited people who could not clap to a beat or had difficulty keeping time with music. Ten participants were interviewed individually by the two lead researchers between 1 July and 24 August 2019 at Berkeley Way West. Two of the 10 participants (the only participants who progressed to being played stimuli from Group 3) were excluded from the study given their proficiency in keeping time with the beat and extraneous motives for participating in the study (general interest in the research area and desire to participate in research activities). The decision was made not to officially verify whether our participants were clinically “beat-deaf” as we did not want to subject participants to the additional stress of a clinical test (the majority of participants found clapping in time to our musical examples during interviews anxiety-inducing enough). Of the eight participants whose videos were analyzed, four identified as men and four as women. The mean age of participants was 30 years(ranging from 18 to 57 years) and the majority were students or employees at the University of California, Berkeley. Informed consent was obtained from all participants, and the study was approved by the Research Ethics Board of Berkeley.

Interviews were video recorded and transcribed verbatim by the researchers. These transcripts, together with notes taken during each interview, form the basis of the data, which were coded and analyzed for recurring themes that emerged between different participants. To ensure validity, themes were separately developed and cross-checked by the researchers before the overarching themes of the study were established. Several themes emerged from the analysis, which describe participants’ strategies for keeping time to the range of musical examples and their experiences of keeping time with different gestures (i.e., clapping vs conducting). These are explained below with illustrative participant quotations.

Experiencing challenges clapping in time

Five of the eight participants emphasized a distinction they felt between the physical act of clapping a beat and the process of identifying the beat in the music, or as Participant 4 described it, “clapping with muscle memory and actually trying to be cognizant of what was actually happening in the song.” Participant 1 described initially trying to “figure out when I should clap and trying to follow” but then eventually defaulting to “I’ll just clap without thinking.” Participant 5 similarly outlined her attempts to try and “count for a beat” but then said that she let her hands “go—whether they go fast, slow, it’s like subconscious.” The processes of listening and clapping were also seemingly separate for Participant 2, who described how cognitively effortful it was to both listen and clap at the same time:

Even if I feel like I can hear it [the beat], it doesn’t naturally translate to clapping or any other thing in my body because I feel like there’s just a lot of mental energy expended trying to just hear it and it’s not like natural to do something else at the same time . . . so even if I feel like I can hear it, which is very rare, then trying to get my body to do the right thing at the right time is difficult. It feels like either I can hear it, or I can clap, but once I start clapping, if I’m focusing on clapping then I’m no longer hearing it, and if I’m hearing it, then my hands are just, like, moving and it doesn’t feel like it’s happening at the same time.

Participant 7 attributed the clapping versus identifying the beat distinction to the cognitive resources that coordinating a clap (i.e., two separate hands coming together at a single point) required:

Clapping I think I’m going to do this, I’m going to place my hands together, so it takes more cognition to clap, I don’t know . . . When it comes to clapping, I really have to think about it, like think about the action of bringing my hands together in order to clap. I’m over-thinking it.

In this, Participant 7 seemed to suggest that while they could focus on either action at one time, coordinating the two required effort that was beyond their capacity.

Clapping strategies for music with percussion

Participants’ clapping strategies for keeping time with the least complex set of musical stimuli (i.e., stimuli where the beat was played explicitly) centered around identifying and focusing on repetitive percussive lines of the music, in particular drums or cymbals, as referents for a periodic beat. Participant 4, for example, felt that he could follow the beat in the first musical example due to a definite percussion sound . . . in this, there was something regular happening that I could identify and latch onto.” In another musical example, Participant 6 identified the point where the drums came in as the point when “the music became more predictable and it was easier to figure out how I could clap to it.

A cause of confusion with stimuli such as these was when there was more than one percussive instrument, for instance for Participant 2: “I was trying to isolate the drum, but I was getting confused by other drum noises.” Another distraction participants faced was when the drum was playing off rather than on the beat. Participant 4 expressed confusion that he was having trouble clapping in time despite being able to hear a drumbeat: “the drumbeat was very regular and easy to hear so it was confusing.” Participant 6 was also unsure about whether clapping in time necessarily meant having to align to the drumbeat: “I don’t know if I was clapping incorrectly with the music because I heard a drumbeat in between where I was clapping, so I didn’t know if I needed to clap with that.” Another issue that arose with this strategy for several participants, including Participant 7, was not being able to pick out the drums over other instruments or lines in the music that were louder and more prominent: “I was trying to hear the drums in the background but they weren’t super prominent, it was more the wind instruments that you could hear.”

An aspect of clapping in time that participants were confused about was whether a beat should be held constant or whether it should change with the music. In response to a change of tempo in Musical Example 3 (see Table 1), Participant 6 expressed confusion: “when the music changed a little bit, I wasn’t sure if the timing would keep itself and so I wasn’t sure if I needed to hold my clapping constant, or I needed to change it up a bit.” Despite years of musical training in high school, Participant 7 was also uncertain about how keeping time to music might mean being responsive to changes within it, rather than keeping an internally consistent beat: “so the clapping doesn’t have to be consistent throughout, it can change, huh?” In response to this uncertainty, several participants described trying to hold their claps constant. For instance, when asked to describe how she decided when to clap, Participant 1 stated that “if I don’t know how to clap with the rhythm, each time I just clap at the same pace.” Participant 2 similarly described choosing a “spacing at random” and “just going with that” when they were unclear about how to respond to a violin’s slight slowing of pace.

Clapping strategies for music with no percussion

Participants tended to associate the beat with background percussion so closely that they were confused about what it meant to clap in time to pieces where the beat was not explicitly played by an instrument (i.e., pieces that did not contain background percussion). For instance, an excerpt of the Spring movement from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons prompted Participant 3 to say, “it’s weird to clap to this piece . . . there’s not a designated bass,” and Participant 4 expressed similar confusion: “I was confused about the beat, because it’s just a violin, right? I was confused about what constituted a beat.”

Generally, on being presented with stimuli that had an absence of an explicitly articulated beat, participants’ overriding strategy was to clap along to the rhythm of the most prominent melody. For instance, seven of eight participants clapped along to the rhythm of the prominent tune (e.g., the violin in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons). As Participant 2 explained, her major strategy was “to clap along to the most prominent instrument or vocal part.” For Participant 3, clapping in time to the music meant focusing on instruments that were loudest:

In the beginning, I was focusing on how the piano was playing because that was the loudest part . . . I was trying to clap to that, which was louder, rather than whatever the other instrument was that was playing behind it.

For Participant 6, who tended to listen to the musical examples carefully before starting to clap, the strategy of listening to prominent instruments was guided by a desire to identify consistent and regular pitch-based patterns, through which a beat might be determined:

I had a little bit of difficulty at the beginning figuring out where the beat was, but then I heard these really high-pitched notes coming time and time again, and they were coming at regular intervals so I guess I interpreted that as that was giving me a clue as to where the beat was. It turned out to be regular and consistent, so I went with that.

Participant 3, after clapping in a seemingly sporadic manner to a musical example, also explained that he was attempting to use the pitch changes of the most prominent instrument as a proxy for the beat:

I guess I’m aware that the beat is supposed to be a regularly spaced pattern, but then, since I’m not able to identify it, the thing I defaulted to was to see how fast the pitches were changing and clap along with how fast that was happening. So if there was a very slow descent of a low pitch, I’d clap slowly and when it was changing quickly, I’d clap fast.

A problem with the strategy of focusing on the rhythm of the most prominent line as a proxy for the beat seemed to arise in musical examples that had multiple prominent lines playing over each other, causing participants to feel overwhelmed. As Participant 2 explained,

it’s hard because I get distracted by all of the singing and all of the multiple layers of rhythm and noises and I have a hard time focusing on something that’s happening–I have a hard time focusing on the rhythm.

Participant 5 also expressed a similar sense of disorientation when faced with texturally rich instrumental music:

I thought I was getting it, but there are so many sounds. I’m trying to find that clap sound, but I think there are just so many layers that I’m listening to and trying to pay attention to, and it makes me feel a little thrown off. There’s so much going on and it’s a little overwhelming sometimes.

Participant 7 went as far as to describe the feeling of shifting attention to different lines in the musical example as “chasing” different instruments:

I’m trying to catch up to the next part of the sound, but then it keeps switching, but I’m trying to play catch up . . . once the violin sound was moving faster, I’m chasing that, and once I hear another part coming in, I’m chasing after a different kind of instrument, so it’s not consistent.

“Feeling the flow” with gestures other than clapping

When participants reached a musical example that they struggled to keep time with, they were invited to keep time with the music with a gesture other than clapping—for instance, head nodding, conducting, or tapping on the table (for a full list of alternative gestures used by participants, see Table 2). All eight participants reported feeling more at ease aligning to a beat with such alternative gestures. When asked about keeping time in this new way compared with clapping, participants reported the experience was “easier” or “more natural,” with less “overthinking.” When asked to directly compare the experience of clapping versus conducting to the same musical excerpt, Participant 7 said,

I was feeling more like part of the music rather than separate from the music, if that makes sense? It’s funny, I actually have to think in order to clap. I have to tell myself to do it. Conducting, I don’t have to tell myself to do it necessarily, it just happens.

The qualitative difference in experience between clapping and alternative timekeeping gestures was echoed by Participant 1:

Clapping means you have to find the heartbeat of the music, it’s not that easy . . . but if you can do something like [gestures playing a violin] you can find the music comes from anywhere . . . I can feel the music flow, it’s easier.

For Participant 5, the experience of “feeling the flow” translated to experiencing the music differently and hearing it more cohesively when she was swaying her head compared with clapping: “it feels more fun and the sound doesn’t feel all over the place. It feels like I’m going in one rhythm.” Participant 6 also described how tapping his fingers together rather than clapping caused him to focus on “specific sounds that the instruments were making and were emphasizing time and time again” instead of focusing solely on the drums to set the rhythm, making it easier for him to “lock into the beat of the music.” Similarly, Participant 7 also referred to a conducting gesture as something that enabled her to “feel the flow of the music” more so than clapping due to the fact that she was no longer “rigidly thinking about rhythm” but concentrating more on “the tone, the sound, something like that.”

Several participants additionally identified the main difference between clapping and alternative timekeeping gestures as the “hard” and “overpowering” sound produced by clapping. For example, Participant 2 explained,

It [pen waving] was easier than clapping because when I clap, there’s a specific instance where I’m supposed to be designating where the beat’s supposed to be, whereas this [pen waving] is pretty flimsy, the boundaries are pretty fuzzy and so I feel like there’s more error allowed in when I’m designating where the beat is, whereas this [clapping], it’s very clearly me making a noise and there’s like feedback and it’s more clear when I’m making a mistake.

Alternative and more continuous timekeeping gestures were accordingly labeled as “more fluid” and “less restrictive,” allowing for a greater range of motion. As Participant 1 stated, when trying to explain why head nodding felt more natural, “I could move my head circular rather than just up and down, so it gave me some freedom with that, unlike a clap, because I guess you can’t prolong a clap sound.” Participant 4 also ascribed the fact that gesturing felt easier than clapping to the greater range of movement available:

I felt like this was easier to do than clapping, it felt a lot more easier. It felt more natural? I’m not sure why though. I guess it was the movement. Like a clap for me allows you to just produce the sound, while this allowed me a bit more movement. I’m not sure why that would help.

Discussion

The aim of this study was to better understand the experiences of “rhythmically challenged” people as they attempt to keep time to music and some of the strategies they adopt to do so. Results reveal several commonalities emerging among participants’ timekeeping strategies. For instance, participants understood the beat to be something that was fixed and unchanging. They tended to use mainly periodic percussive lines where available to guide their attempts to identify the beat and to clap in time. This reliance on percussion meant that they struggled to keep time with multi-layered music, when many instruments or sounds competed for their attention. When an underlying percussive beat was not present, many participants defaulted to clapping along to the rhythm of the most prominent instrument.

Participants also reported finding it significantly easier to align to an underlying beat in the musical extracts when they were asked to keep time with movements other than clapping, such as swaying their bodies from side to side, nodding their head, or conducting. When using such movements, participants reported feeling more in sync with the music and not feeling as stark a distinction between the physical act of keeping time and identifying the beat that they reported with clapping. Some participants ascribed the difference between clapping and other timekeeping gestures to the absence of a definite clap sound or to the greater expressivity these alternative gestures afforded, compared with clapping. For many, the specific movement used to keep time with the music also appeared to affect the features in the music that participants were attending to in order to discern the underlying beat. For instance, when using alternative gestures, participants were more likely to experience the music as a coherent whole, rather than disparate voices or phrases. This finding aligns with research on the central role of the human motor system, gestures, and body movement in shaping both musical perception (Godøy & Leman, 2010; Maes et al., 2014) and predictive timing (Morillon & Baillet, 2017).

One alternative explanation for the fact that participants were better able to feel the “flow” of the musical stimuli while engaging in non-clapping gestures may be due to the different control processes and representations of time required to engage in such bodily movements. Zelaznik et al. (2002), for example, note that discrete periodic movements (such as clapping) require an explicit representation of time to frame goals in terms of “when” some salient point (e.g., the point of contact between the two hands) will be achieved. In contrast, the authors describe how smoother, more continuous gestures (e.g., continuous circle drawing or swaying) have more of a focus on the “how” and require a more implicit form of timing. Zelaznik et al. (2002) thus argue that continuous movements may have more emergent temporal properties that in turn may afford easier coordination of movement with music for our participants. While all participants’ alternative gestures fall on a continuum between strictly continuous and discrete, the majority of alternative gestures did not have a well-defined midpoint, meaning that the temporal properties of such alternative gestures may have been more emergent and easier to coordinate with listening.

Another key difference between clapping and alternative gestures, as noted by our participants, is that clapping is sound-producing, while movements like swaying might be classified as more expression-supporting gestures (Jensenius & Wanderley, 2010). The latter have been studied in musicians (Desmet et al., 2012) and found to correlate with musicians’ cognitive ability to focus on the musical shaping of phrases, which, if highlighted, would make the beat easier to perceive. Overall, the range of competencies that were exhibited by our participants using clapping and alternative movements transcend the binary, pathological undertones of the “beat-deaf” phenomenon, and instead demonstrate the diverse means by which one may adapt despite being rhythmically challenged. Our participants’ success at identifying and aligning to the beat more easily with some musical examples compared to others also exemplifies the significance of musical context in studying how people keep time with music.

Limitations

Although our results demonstrate advantages to the qualitative analysis of our participants’ articulation of their experiences and strategies, there are limitations associated with the collection of such self-reported data—for instance, participants’ possible lack of self-awareness regarding their own experiences or lack of reliability at accurately conveying their thought processes. Another limitation of this study, aside from the relatively small sample size, was the lack of more quantitative analyses on participants’ bodily movements or clapping accuracy. While participants’ alternative methods of keeping time (i.e., movements other than clapping) appeared to align more closely with an underlying beat, we felt that a more formal analysis of this was beyond the scope of this article, given our central focus on trying to better understand participants’ self-reported listening experiences and timekeeping strategies. As such, we hope that these tentative results may serve as a useful pilot to aid the design of subsequent experiments that might compare synchronization accuracy between different movements more formally.

Our musical stimuli were ranked according to our perceptions of beat strength rather than a more quantitative measure, although the fact that our participants tended to struggle more with stimuli we identified as having lower beat salience indicated that this largely instinctual grouping was on the whole a success. However, participants’ ability to successfully keep time with the musical stimuli could also have been effected by factors such as their familiarity with the music, whether or not there was singing,and also the musical style or genre the piece belonged to, all of which we did not control for. Coming into the study, participants also had a range of musical experiences and exposures (for instance, while Participant 3 had never been to a concert, Participant 6 would go to concerts regularly with friends) which were also not controlled for. Many of our participants were also very nervous about “getting it right,” and many mentioned being highly embarrassed and anxious about their inability to clap in time—despite our best attempts to set our participants at ease, these nerves likely influenced their engagement and performance in tasks.

In terms of our protocol, participants were also asked to keep time with an alternative movement after attempting to clap in time to the music. The increased fluency and ability to keep in time with the music that we perceived and that they described in comparison with clapping may have derived from slightly increased familiarity with the stimulus, rather than change in movement alone. Finally, participants who took part in this study self-identified as having trouble clapping in time to a beat and were not officially verified as being “beat-deaf” through the use of a more formal diagnostic test. All of our participants, however, had evident struggles with keeping time to the beat. Even our excluded participants, who we would not characterize as having trouble clapping in time, appeared to share some characteristics of participants who did have trouble clapping in time, particularly when exposed to our more complex musical stimuli.

Future work

The interview data collected during this set of task-based interviews are rich, and further study will undoubtedly yield further insights into the condition of beat-deafness and question of why it is more difficult for some to keep time to a beat compared to others. For instance, at the end of the interview, participants were invited to spontaneously move freely to a song of their choice and most did so in a somewhat rhythmical manner. We are interested in analyzing the nature of their movements to try and further understand variations in their ability to keep time with musical stimuli. We intend to use such data and conclusions to develop an intervention to see whether and on what time scale it might be possible to improve the sense of rhythm of people who find it challenging to clap in time to music. Finally, in trying to understand the origins of the difficulty some face attempting to clap in time to music, questions have been raised about the nature of rhythm and the structural qualities in music that generate a beat. This is a theoretical question we are looking to explore further, using our graded list of musical stimuli as a starting point.

Conclusion

In this qualitative study seeking to better understand the timekeeping strategies and experiences of those who find it hard to clap in time to music, participants described and reflected on ways in which they kept time with a variety of music examples, via clapping and alternative movements, such as swaying and head nodding. The majority reported struggles in their attempts to simultaneously identify the beat and clap along to it with complex multi-instrumental musical stimuli, defaulting to either latching onto repetitive percussive lines or clapping in such a way as to mirror the rhythm of the most prominent instrument. All participants, however, found that changing the gesture that they used to keep time from clapping to alternative movements made the process of keeping time feel easier and more natural, seemingly by affecting what participants were perceiving in the music. In addition to having implications for the teaching of music, our study represents an initial first step in gaining insight into the subjective experiences and timekeeping strategies of those who cannot keep time to a beat and suggests a need for an embodied approach—including an analysis of various timekeeping gestures—in the investigation of beat perception and timekeeping with music in general.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Dor Abrahamson and our two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and critical comments. We additionally express deep gratitude to Prof. Jeanne Bamberger for her wisdom, enthusiasm, and support throughout the study.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Financial support for this work was provided by the University of California, Berkeley’s Randi A. Engle Innovation Grant.

ORCID iD

Leela Velautham

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