Collective dynamics support group drumming, reduce variability, and stabilize tempo drift

Abstract

AbstractHumans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Social interaction has largely been studied in dyadic contexts. The presence of multiple agents engaged in the same task space creates different constraints and possibilities that have been studied more extensively in nonhuman animal behaviour. We addressed whether collective dynamics play a role in human circle drumming. The task was to synchronize in a group with an initial reference pattern and then maintain synchronization after it was muted. We varied the number of drummers, from solo to dyad, quartet, and octet. The observed lower variability, lack of speeding up, smoother individual dynamics, and leader-less inter-personal coordination indicated that stability increased as group size increased, a sort of temporal wisdom of crowds. We propose a hybrid continuous-discrete Kuramoto model for emergent group synchronization with pulse-based coupling that exhibits a mean field positive feedback loop. This research has theoretical implications about collective intentionality and social cognition.