The Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2013;787:453-61. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4614-1590-9_50.
Musicians often say that they not only hear but also "feel" music. To explore the contribution of tactile information to "feeling" music, we investigated the degree that auditory and tactile inputs are integrated in humans performing a musical meter-recognition task. Subjects discriminated between two types of sequences, "duple" (march-like rhythms) and "triple" (waltz-like rhythms), presented in three conditions: (1) unimodal inputs (auditory or tactile alone); (2) various combinations of bimodal inputs, where sequences were distributed between the auditory and tactile channels such that a single channel did not produce coherent meter percepts; and (3) bimodal inputs where the two channels contained congruent or incongruent meter cues. We first show that meter is perceived similarly well (70-85 %) when tactile or auditory cues are presented alone. We next show in the bimodal experiments that auditory and tactile cues are integrated to produce coherent meter percepts. Performance is high (70-90 %) when all of the metrically important notes are assigned to one channel and is reduced to 60 % when half of these notes are assigned to one channel. When the important notes are presented simultaneously to both channels, congruent cues enhance meter recognition (90 %). Performance dropped dramatically when subjects were presented with incongruent auditory cues (10 %), as opposed to incongruent tactile cues (60 %), demonstrating that auditory input dominates meter perception. These observations support the notion that meter perception is a cross-modal percept with tactile inputs underlying the perception of "feeling" music.
音乐家常说他们不仅“听”音乐，还能“感受”音乐。为了探究触觉信息对“感受”音乐的贡献，我们研究了在人类执行音乐节拍识别任务时，听觉和触觉输入的整合程度。实验中，被试者需区分两种类型的序列：“二拍子”（进行曲式节奏）和“三拍子”（圆舞曲式节奏），并在三种条件下进行：（1）单模态输入（听觉或触觉单独呈现）；（2）各种双模态输入的组合，其中序列分布在听觉和触觉通道之间，以使单个通道不会产生连贯的节拍感知；（3）双模态输入，其中两个通道包含一致或不一致的节拍线索。我们首先表明，当仅呈现触觉或听觉线索时，节拍感知效果相似（70-85%）。接着，在双模态实验中，我们发现听觉和触觉线索被整合以产生连贯的节拍感知。当所有的度量重要音符都分配到一个通道时，表现最高（70-90%），而当这些音符的一半分配到一个通道时，表现则降低到 60%。当重要的音符同时呈现给两个通道时，一致的线索会增强节拍识别（90%）。当给被试呈现不一致的听觉线索（10%）时，表现显著下降，而呈现不一致的触觉线索（60%）时，表现下降程度则相对较小，这表明听觉输入主导着节拍感知。这些观察结果支持了这样一种观点，即节拍感知是一种跨模态感知，触觉输入是“感受”音乐的基础。
