Movie S1 - The Evolutionary Biology of Musical Rhythm: Was Darwin Wrong?

Illustration of a new method for testing if horses synchronize their gait to the beat of music, from [61]. In this “circular trotting to music” method, a horse trots in circles around a trainer while ambient music with a clear beat is played in the arena. The trainer wears closed-ear headphones and listens to masking music with no beat (e.g., meditation music), in order to avoid giving the horse inadvertent cues to the musical beat. Using frame-by-frame video analysis and quantitative statistical methods, the timing of the horse's footfalls are compared to the timing of musical beats to test for synchronization. The test is repeated at several different tempi to examine tempo flexibility, as in [49].

(MP4)