The Rhythm of Life: Modeling Musical Tempo Across the Lifespan

Main funder

Funder's project number: 356841

Funds granted by main funder (€)

Funding program

Project timetable

Project start date: 01/09/2023

Project end date: 31/08/2027

Summary

Music is widely accepted as a human universal known to produce a multisensory experience that impacts psychological, neurological, physiological, and behavioral functions. As such, it offers a window into the human experience on a fundamental level. Tempo (including its absence) is an essential characteristic of music used to express specific emotions, suggest particular musical styles, and build/release tension as well as influence listeners’ perception of emotion, arousal level, and music-induced body movement. Recent work suggests that production and perception of musical tempo changes across the lifespan as a result of age-related physical slowdown and changes in reasons for listening. Yet inadequate data on relationships between production of musical tempo and artist age, insufficient knowledge concerning influence of age-related psychophysical factors on tempo preference, and a lack of reliable datasets and computational methods to estimate tempo at scale leave notable gaps in the state of the art. Our principal aims in this multidisciplinary music science project are to elucidate 1) artists’ musical tempo production and 2) listeners’ tempo experience as a function of age, and 3) develop improved methods for estimating musical tempo at scale. Across a series of descriptive and empirical studies, utilising online, laboratory, motion capture, and computational methods, we will create a comprehensive first-of-its-kind lifespan model of musical tempo with broad implications for work on perception, (embodied) cognition, and computer science, as well as ageing, health, and aesthetics. In the process, we will create the largest database yet (by an order of magnitude) of annotated tempi for use by the wider community as a ground-truth against which to test MIR-based tempo estimation methods. In light of tempo's role as a basic building block of virtually all music, we expect to generate new knowledge relevant not only to music as art or science but, given the universality of music and the fundamental role it plays in people’s everyday lives, to society as a whole.

Principal Investigator

Other persons related to this project (JYU)

Primary responsible unit

Follow-up groups

Profiling area: Behaviour change, health, and well-being across the lifespan (University of Jyväskylä JYU) BC-Well; School of Resource Wisdom (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.Wisdom; School of Wellbeing (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.Well

Related publications and other outputs