The Department of Cognitive Science

cordially invites you

to the public defense of the PhD thesis

Joint Music-Making and Temporal Coordination in Joint Action

by

Thomas Wolf

PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Gunther Knoblich

SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Natalie Sebanz

Members of the Dissertation Committee:

Erno Teglas, Chair, CEU

Stephen Butterfill, external examiner, Warwick, and

Peter Keller, external examiner, Western Sydney University

abstract | When humans engage in joint action, they bring about changes in the environment together by coordinating in space and time. Even such simple joint actions as shaking hands require sophisticated temporal coordination. This is even more obvious for complex forms of joint action, such as joint music-making. Indeed, joint music-making is a domain that demands an exquisite degree of precision in temporal coordination. It also poses additional challenges, which arise from the need to predict and adapt to each other’s actions – often on different instruments and with different skill levels – while performing extraordinarily complex patterns and adhering to context-dependent aesthetic criteria and performance targets. In this thesis, I present three studies in which I investigated how expert and novice musicians deal with three such challenges. The findings illuminate the basic mechanisms underpinning humans’ remarkable ability to coordinate the timing of their actions both in musical and in non-musical joint actions. In the first study, I investigated expert pianists’ ability to adjust their temporal predictions to the systematic, but suboptimal, timing deviations of novice pianists. In a music coordination task, expert pianists had access to different pieces of information about their co-performer and the co-performer’s part. The results indicate that experts use information about the novice’s performance style during easier passages and information about the novice’s part (i.e. the score) during passages that are difficult to perform. In the second study, I asked participants to adapt to an unusual coordination pattern under various coordination conditions. The primary question was whether the weaker coupling between limbs in interpersonal coordination (e.g., the two hands of two different individuals) during joint performances allows for better adaptation to difficult coordination patterns than the stronger coupling between limbs in intrapersonal coordination (e.g., the two hands of one person). The results show that while strong coupling between limbs facilitates precise coordination in simple coordination patterns, this advantage disappears in more difficult patterns. The third study focuses on a particular performance bias, namely the tendency to gradually increase tempo during joint music-making (‘rushing’). The central question was whether this bias is specific to joint performance, or whether it also occurs during solo music-making. The results indicate that rushing is indeed specific to joint performance. Various hypotheses concerning the underlying mechanisms of rushing are discussed and tested. Of these mechanisms, the findings speak in favor of a combination of human-specific period correction mechanisms, and evolutionarily ancient synchronization mechanisms found even among distantly related species of chorusing insects. In this thesis, I treat the domain of joint music-making as a microcosm in which to study humans’ remarkable ability to precisely coordinate their actions in time. The three studies focus on some of the challenges that humans face when trying to coordinate their actions in time during joint music-making, but the findings also have broader significance: they provide us with new insights into the general mechanisms of temporal coordination in humans, and offer new starting points and constraints for research on joint action.

The defense will take place at Oktober 6 street 7, Oktober Hall, on Thursday, May 30, 10 am 

organized by the Department of Cognitive Science