New Findings on the Evolutionary Origins of Beat Synchronization

When we hear a beat, we tend to move our bodies to it automatically. Is this tendency to move in time with musical rhythm genetically determined? An international research team involving Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA, and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main decided to investigate this question. The results of their extensive study, which included more than 600,000 research participants, have recently been published as an open-access article in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.