Musicians and Non-musicians Adapting to Tempo Differences in Cooperative Tapping Tasks Neta Spiro, *1 Tommi Himberg #2 * Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Centre, London, UK # Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research, Department of Music, University of Jyväskylä, Finland 1 neta.spiro@nordoff.robbins.org.uk, 2 tommi.himberg@gmail.com ABSTRACT A number of factors, including musical training, affect our entrainment to each other. Personality traits seem to correlate with some musical behaviours but it is not known whether this extends to entrainment. We observe patterns of interaction in tapping tasks in which people entrain or resist entrainment, and investigate whether these patterns relate to musical training or personality traits of the participants. Seventy-four musicians and non-musicians were finger-tapping in pairs under 3 conditions; solo, duet in the same tempo, and duet in different tempi. Participants completed questionnaires about their musical experience, the Big Five Inventory and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. In duet tasks, entraining with the partner was often a yes-no question: the pair either locked in sync or stayed apart. Participants did not entrain in all same tempo trials, but often did so even in trials with maximum tempo difference (33 BPM). In general, participants kept their own tempo better in solo than in duet trials. Musicians were found to be more self-consistent than non-musicians in all conditions. No clear effects of personality were found, even though in the second half of the study participants were paired based on their personality scores. There was a considerable variability in performance even when the same pairs repeated tasks. I. INTRODUCTION From a very young age we quickly and automatically en- train and adapt to other people’s beats (Kirschner and To- masello, 2009). This is a socially contingent phenomenon with children and adults entraining to each other better than to a metronome (Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009, Himberg, 2006). Entrainment has been associated with socially benefi- cial outcomes in various contexts; in adults, children, care-giver infant interactions, conversation as well as music. (Bispham, 2006; Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009; Sebanz, Bekkering, & Knoblich, 2006; Tomasello & Carpenter, 2007; Oullier, de Guzman, Jantzen, Lagarde & Kelso, 2008; McNeill, 1995; Hove & Risen, 2009; Malloch, 1999; Trehub, 2003; Trevarthen, 1999; Cowley, Moodley & Fiori-Cowley, 2004; Macrae, Duffy, Miles & Lawrence, 2008; Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). Our ability to entrain to and hold a metronomic pulse has been extensively studied, mostly in solo conditions, partici- pants synchronising with computer metronomes (see Repp, 2005 for a review), but the psychological and musical factors that are important for these effects are unclear. Also, only a few studies have also looked at entrainment in dyads and groups, or in actual musical contexts (Himberg, 2006, Him- berg & Thompson, 2011; Konvalinka, Vuust, Roepstorff & Frith, 2010; Lucas, Clayton & Leante, 2011). Given that we can automatically entrain with music and the “ceiling effect” that this tends to have on entrainment measures, we opted to study resisting entrainment with the goal of beginning to ex- plore the limits of entrainment and the contributing factors. This is done in order to observe a wider range of behavioural patterns than is usually possible in studies of entrainment and to shed light on the higher level psychological processes and factors involved. Currently, it remains unclear whether there is a link between the participants’ social traits and their musi- cal behaviour – for instance, do personality traits such as con- scientiousness or empathy affect entrainment? In this study, two people are given two different, unrelated pulses and are asked to play at the same time while maintain- ing their own pulse. In the light of previous studies (Himberg 2006; Himberg, forthcoming), the participants are expected to entrain to each other’s pulse at least occasionally regardless of the tempo difference; the patterns of these interactions will be of interest. Psychological factors, such as leadership, consci- entiousness and the tendency to adopt the partner’s point of view (empathy) might have an effect on these “negotiation processes”. In unpublished student projects supervised by the second author, some indications of these links have been found. In music students, extroversion as assessed with the Big Five Inventory (John & Srivastava, 1999) was somewhat correlated with the synchronisation accuracy in finger tapping tasks, while those scoring high in neuroticism had lower tapping stability. However, these effects have been small and in an- other project, assertiveness scores and co-operative tapping performance showed no correlation. These studies have had a small number of participants, and they have been music stu- dents, with the task to entrain to the metronome and/or to each other. In order to determine whether personality factors have an effect or not, a larger sample is needed. Also, music stu- dents might have “overlearned” the beat-tracking and tem- po-keeping skills needed to perform these kinds of tasks, which might not only lead to a ceiling effect (and low inter- personal variance) in terms of their synchronisation accuracy, but their training may overshadow any personality effects. Indeed, previous studies have shown that musicians outper- form non-musicians in these kinds of tasks; they have greater attunement abilities, more accurate synchronisation and less variability in their tapping rates (Drake, Jones & Bharuch, 2000). Repp (2003) has studied how a distractor beat affects par- ticipants who are synchronising with a metronome. Although Repp’s experiment is different from ours, his results help us to predict the outcomes of this study. In Repp’s study, tappers distracted with an unrelated beat got faster, their beat was 950