Rhythmic Analysis in Animal Communication, Speech, and Music: The Normalized Pairwise Variability Index Is a Summary Statistic of Rhythm Ratios
Rhythm is fundamental in many physical and biological systems. Rhythm is relevant to a broad range of phenomena across different fields, including animal bioacoustics, speech sciences, and music cognition. As a result, the interest in developing consistent quantitative measures for cross-disciplinar...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2025-03-01
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| Series: | Vibration |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2571-631X/8/2/12 |
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| Summary: | Rhythm is fundamental in many physical and biological systems. Rhythm is relevant to a broad range of phenomena across different fields, including animal bioacoustics, speech sciences, and music cognition. As a result, the interest in developing consistent quantitative measures for cross-disciplinary rhythmic analysis is growing. Two quantitative measures that can be directly applied to any temporal structure are the normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) and rhythm ratios (r<sub>k</sub>). The nPVI summarizes the overall isochrony of a sequence, i.e., how regularly spaced a sequence’s events are, as a single value. Meanwhile, r<sub>k</sub> quantifies ratios between a sequence’s adjacent intervals and is often used for identifying rhythmic categories. Here, we show that these two rhythmic measures are fundamentally connected: the nPVI is a summary static of the r<sub>k</sub> values of a temporal sequence. This result offers a deeper understanding of how these measures are applied. It also opens the door for creating novel, custom measures to quantify rhythmic patterns based on a sequence’s r<sub>k</sub> distribution and compare rhythmic patterns across different domains. The explicit connection between nPVI and r<sub>k</sub> is one further step towards a common quantitative toolkit for rhythm research across disciplines. |
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| ISSN: | 2571-631X |