Rhythm telephone

Memory for rhythm is not a recording. Each time you repeat a rhythm, you nudge it a little toward what you expect to hear. This page lets you watch it happen.

You hear a random rhythm of three clicks, looping every two seconds, and tap along. Each round plays it six times (the study used ten), and nothing moves on screen while it plays, so you follow the sound alone. Your taps become the rhythm you hear next, as in the game of telephone. After five rounds the small errors stop looking random: the rhythm drifts toward one your mind prefers, often a simple ratio such as 1:1:2. We used this game to map the rhythms people expect in 39 groups across 15 countries.

How to read the triangle

Every three-interval rhythm with a fixed total length is a point in the triangle. A rhythm with one very long interval sits near a corner; the evenly spaced rhythm 1:1:1 sits in the centre. Grey dots mark the 22 small-integer-ratio rhythms used to describe the results of the study. Each round of your chain moves the blue path, and the end of each finished chain adds to the red map. Do five or six chains and the red patches start to show your rhythm prior.

If a round’s taps are too sparse or too fast to read, the round plays again. Your finished chains stay in this browser, so your map keeps building across visits.

What the study found

The groups ranged from large cities to Indigenous communities. Every group’s map was sparse, with sharp peaks at small integer ratios: rhythms are remembered as a few categories rather than a continuum. Which ratios mattered most differed from group to group, often in ways that echo local music. The shared categories may help music survive being passed from person to person, while local traditions shape which ones dominate.

Your own map shows your rhythm prior, shaped by the music you grew up with.

Where this comes from

More interactive experiments