One particularly interesting recent example from Nori Jacoby and Josh McDermott takes its methodological inspiration from the game of telephone. In this familiar diversion, one person whispers a sentence to another, who in turn whispers it to someone else. The whispered exchanges continue until the message winds its way back to the original speaker, who often finds the content radically transformed. In Jacoby and McDermott’s task, participants hear a random rhythm and are asked to reproduce it as closely as possible by tapping along with it. The pattern of taps they produce is then played back to them as the next rhythmic sequence they’re asked to match, and so on and so forth in a kind of game of tapping telephone. Across the course of this iterative process, tapping patterns settle into rhythmic structures common in the participants’ musical environment. By examining how these structures change from place to place, this research can illuminate the interrelationship between culture and a person’s sense of time.
“What can psychology tell us about music?“ from OUP