The Legacy of Paul Fraisse: Two Classic Papers on Synchronization

ABSTRACT-This brief essay provides an introduction to subsequent English translations of two classic papers on synchronization by Paul Fraisse and colleagues. The relevance of this pioneering work to more recent research on synchronization is pointed out. The study of rhythm and time perception has a long history that goes back to the beginnings of experimental psychology. However, the great pioneer in the mid-20th century was Paul Fraisse (ign-iggo) who together with various collaborators conducted an impressive amount of systematic research in these areas, devoting much of his long career to it. His work was published in the form of monographs, book chapters, and numerous journal articles, nearly all of them in French. To English-speaking readers, Fraisse 's oeuvre is known primarily through the English translation of his book Psychologie du temps [The Psychology of Time] (Fraisse, 1957, 1963), his chapter in Diana Deutsch 's first edition of The Psychology of Music (Fraisse, 1982), and a review article in the Annual Review of Psychology (Fraisse, 1984). The original research articles, however, as well as several important monographs remain untranslated and thus are relatively inaccessible to those not conversant with French. By offering here English translations of two of Fraisse's classic articles, I hope to acquaint a larger readership with some of his path-breaking research and to facilitate its citation in future publications. (See also Fraisse, 1974, for a brief English summary of his research on synchronization.) Fraisse was a clever experimenter and used the best technology available at the time, even though it seems rather old-fashioned now. He always took a close look at his data and extracted a maximum of information from them, arriving at interesting conclusions that sometimes were far ahead of his time. His reports are succinct and clear-sighted. Only the amount of data collected and the statistical analyses sometimes fall short of today's standards; this invites replication and re-examination. One topic of particular interest to Fraisse was sensorimotor synchronization, and he conducted some of the earliest research on this topic. The two articles I selected both deal with it, albeit in different ways. The article by Fraisse and Ehrlich (1955) reports the first systematic study of off-beat tapping (also called anti-phase tapping or syncopation), where the task is to tap in the intervals between tones occurring in a regular sequence. The authors show that the difficulty of this task increases as the tempo of the sequence increases, and that the taps are systematically displaced from the midpoint of the interval between tones, in a way that depends on tempo as well. It should be noted that participants apparently were not specifically instructed to tap at the interval midpoint; they were considered successful if they made one tap in each interval. Thus, the criterion for what constituted successful syncopation was rather lax, and the timing patterns obtained may reflect a reactive, non-metrical strategy adopted by some participants. Also, the authors unfortunately do not provide any information regarding the musical training of their participants. The wide range of performance and variability obtained suggests that the participant group was heterogeneous in that respect. Documenting an involuntary tendency to switch from syncopation to synchronization when the sequence tempo gets fast, the study of Fraisse and Ehrlich constitutes an early precursor to the seminal research of Kelso (e.g., Haken, Kelso, & Bunz, 1985; Kelso, 1984; Kelso, DelColle, & Schoner, 1990) and other dynamic systems theorists on phase transitions in movement coordination. Those studies of motor control are usually concerned with oscillatory limb movements rather than with tapping on a surface. Recently, however, off-beat tapping has been re-examined in a number of studies from a musical perspective (e. …