The Role of Cultural Familiarity, Musicianship and Explicit Learning in the Perception of Long Rhythmic Cycles.

Rhythmic cycles from North Indian Classical Music (NICM) commonly contain 6 to 16 beats per cycle. Despite their prominence in NICM, these long rhythmic cycles remain unexplored in rhythm perception research, which has concentrated mainly on Western meters or the short/fast meters characteristic of musical traditions like those of Turkey and the Balkans. Long rhythmic cycles from NICM also raise questions about whether isochrony is considered easier to perceive as compared to non-isochrony (based on research on short/fast meters) and remains so when the rhythmic cycles are longer than those previously studied. This study addresses this gap by investigating two prominent rhythmic cycles from NICM: the 16-beat ISO-Teental and the 7-beat NI-Rupaktal. Given the significant role of cultural familiarity and musicianship in shaping rhythm perception, the study examines four participant groups: Culturally Familiar Musicians (N = 32), Culturally Familiar Non-Musicians (N = 44), Culturally Unfamiliar Musicians (N = 34), and Culturally Unfamiliar Non-Musicians (N = 30). Additionally, a novel short-term explicit learning paradigm is employed to explore whether it can influence the effects of enculturation observed in prior research. Culture-specific musical expertise, rather than mere familiarity with the culture or musicianship alone, is found to be the most relevant in the similarity perception of the structure of these long rhythmic cycles. An effect of short-term explicit learning was observed in NI-Rupaktal for Culturally Familiar Non-musicians and Culturally Unfamiliar (western) Musicians. This effect was not observed for the ISO-Teental rhythmic cycle, unlike the previous studies, which we attribute to the cognitive load in the perception of the long ISO-Teental cycle.