Why do we tap our feet to a musical beat?
In a paper recently published by the Journal of New Music Research , Professor Rolf Inge Godøy and colleagues at the University of Oslo explore the theory behind the relationship between musical sound and body movement. Previous studies have shown that people tend to perceive affinities between sound and body motion when experiencing music. The so-called ‘motor theory of perception’ claims these similarity relationships are deeply rooted in human cognition. According to the theory, in order to perceive something, we