Tactusin Performance: Constraints and Possibilities

A student string quartet was coached by the author to perform a set of seven musical excerpts twice, keeping the same tempo in each performance but feeling and expressing a different main beat (tactus) in each performance. Two empirical studies were conducted to determine the degree to which the quartet’s intentions were communicated to study participants. In the initial study, participants viewed the full A/V performances and were asked to tap their dominant hand along with the main beat of the music. In a second study, the participants completed the same tapping task in response to either audio-only or video-only versions of the same performances. Finally, the audio and video of these performances were analyzed separately using the meter-finding computer model of Janata & Tomic (2008).Overall, the quartet’s intention significantly influenced participants’ choice of tactus under the A/V and video-only conditions, but not under the audio-only conditions. Thus visual information is key to tactus communication even in an ostensibly sonic art form. In individual excerpts, however, aspects of metric structure appeared to constrain tactus choice, and objective visual and aural cues uncovered by computer analysis were not always matched by participant responses. Together, the results shed light on the extent to which this type of communication depends on the combination of tempo, a performance’s aural and visual components, and musical structure.