Influence of Late Reverberation and Echoes on Rhythmic Drum Playing

Musical interpretation is influenced by the acoustics of the room in which musicians perform, though studies are not unanimous about the way acoustical parameters affect musical interpretation. Instead of considering the influence of the global and complex acoustics of a room, the present study focuses on a simpler model. A previous study showed the impact of a single echo on the tempo. This study completes the model by adding a basic synthetic late reverberation. An experimental protocol in which participants were asked to play a rhythmic pattern while hearing an echo and a reverberation was set up for this purpose. The results reveal that the echo has an influence on the tempo produced by the participants: when the delay of the echo is shorter than the inter onset interval of two notes, people tend to accelerate. If the delay is longer, people tend to slow down. However, the reverberation time has no influence on the tempo. This study is a second step to understand musical adaptations to an acoustic environment in the case of rhythmic reproduction.