Collective dynamics support group drumming, reduce variability, and stabilize tempo drift
- McMaster University, Canada
- University of Connecticut, United States
Abstract
Humans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Human social interaction has largely been addressed in dyadic paradigms and it is yet to be determined whether the ensuing conclusions generalize to larger groups. Studied more extensively in nonhuman animal behaviour, the presence of multiple agents engaged in the same task space creates different constraints and possibilities than in simpler dyadic interactions. We addressed whether collective dynamics play a role in human circle drumming. The task was to synchronize in a group with an initial reference pattern and then maintain synchronization after it was muted. We varied the number of drummers, from solo to dyad, quartet, and octet. The observed lower variability, lack of speeding up, smoother individual dynamics, and leader-less inter-personal coordination indicated that stability increased as group size increased, a sort of temporal wisdom of crowds. We propose a hybrid continuous-discrete Kuramoto model for emergent group synchronization with pulse-based coupling that exhibits a mean field positive feedback loop. This research suggests that collective phenomena are among the factors that play a role in social cognition.
Data availability
The current manuscript is a computational study, so no data have been generated for this manuscript.
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Author details
Funding
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
- Laurel Trainor
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Laurel Trainor
CIFAR
- Laurel Trainor
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: The informed consent explained the overall goals of the study to the participants, including that the collected drumming data would potentially be used in a scientific paper, and that the procedure had been approved by the McMaster Research Ethics Board, protocol #2164.
Copyright
© 2022, Dotov et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Collective dynamics support group drumming, reduce variability, and stabilize tempo drift
eLife 11:e74816.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74816
