Discriminating Unfamiliar Long Rhythmic Cycles: Influence of Memory and Chunking

Research on rhythm perception has largely focused on short rhythmic cycles typical in Western music, leaving a gap in our understanding of the perception and memory for longer and unfamiliar rhythmic structures found in other musical traditions. North Indian Classical Music (NICM), for example, features long rhythmic cycles varying in structure, duration, and number of beats. This study investigates how unfamiliar musicians, those with no prior exposure to NICM, perceive and discriminate these long rhythmic cycles, with a focus on working memory capacity and chunking strategy. Participants completed a rhythm discrimination task involving NICM cycles that varied in duration, number of beats, and rhythmic structure (isochronous vs. non-isochronous). The study also contained a digit span task to assess working memory, followed by selecting a grouping structure representing the pattern. Results revealed a significant positive correlation between digit span scores and rhythm discrimination accuracy. Rhythm discrimination performance declined as cycle duration increased, and performance was better for isochronous cycles than non-isochronous ones. There was also an effect of length (number of beats) for rhythm discrimination of non-isochronous cycles. Furthermore, grouping or chunking strategies were associated with higher discrimination scores, particularly for shorter cycles. These findings suggest that working memory capacity and perceptual strategies such as chunking play a critical role in processing long rhythmic cycles.