Music has not yet taken the next step — but the body already knows when it will sound.
A foot touches the floor, palms meet in a clap, dozens of people turn in unison in a dance. We call this a sense of rhythm, though in reality the brain is doing something remarkable: extracting an invisible pulse from a stream of sounds and continuing to hear it even when the next beat does not sound.
Why are we able to anticipate a musical beat? Are we born with this ability? And is the human being truly the only creature on the planet capable of feeling rhythm and entering into coordinated movement with it?
A new scientific review has brought together the results of more than two decades of research and offered a fresh look at the origin of one of the most mysterious human abilities.
A rhythm that is not in the sound
10 September 2026 in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences a critical review was published Critical Review on the Development and Evolution of Beat Perception — “A Critical Review of the Development and Evolution of Beat Perception.”
Its authors are Gábor Háden of the HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences in Budapest and Henkjan Honing, professor of cognitive musicology at the University of Amsterdam. The authors compared data accumulated over several decades on the perception of rhythm in newborns, adults and other animals.
In music there are two related but not identical phenomena.
Rhythm — the actual sequence of sounds and pauses: drumbeats, claps, accents, short and long notes.
Musical pulse, or beat, — the internal regularity that the listener extracts from this sequence. It is to this that we begin to sway, step, clap or dance.
The pulse may not coincide with every individual sound. Some beats are skipped, hidden by syncopations or distributed among different instruments — but the mind continues to hold on to an internal grid of time.
We hear not only what has already sounded. We predict what is to sound next.
The brain's musical forecast
If a metronome is beating out equal strokes, finding the pulse is comparatively easy. But real music is considerably more complex: it speeds up and slows down, creates pauses, shifts accents and plays with the listener's expectations.
The brain continuously compares the incoming sounds, notices patterns and builds a forecast. When an expected beat is skipped, it is physically absent — yet our internal model of the rhythm is preserved.
That is why a silence arising at the right moment can be felt almost as strongly as a drumbeat.
The perception of a musical pulse is not a passive registration of sound waves. It is an active creation of a temporal structure, within which music acquires direction and continuation.
Rhythm exists in the composition, but comes alive in the encounter with the listener.
The sense of rhythm is present already at birth
Studies of newborns show that the foundations of this ability manifest extremely early.
In experiments, sleeping infants were played repeating rhythmic sequences, from which a metrically significant sound was sometimes omitted. Electroencephalography — EEG — recorded a change in the brain's electrical activity at the moment when the expected stroke should have sounded, although the sound itself was absent.
The infant's nervous system was not merely perceiving individual signals. It was detecting regularity and forming an expectation of continuation.
The child cannot yet walk, clap or consciously dance, but its brain already reacts to a disruption of the temporal structure.
The authors of the review believe that sensitivity to periodicity has an early biological basis. However, the mature human sense of rhythm develops gradually — together with movement, attention, learning, social experience and musical culture.
We come into the world with the capacity to notice order, but only with time do we learn to turn it into coordinated movement.
Do animals dance?
For a long time, synchronising movements with music was considered an exclusively human ability. But in the late 2000s, the cockatoo Snowball gained wide fame, his movements changing along with the tempo of the music.
Later, scientists discovered individual components of rhythmic perception in certain other animals as well, including parrots, sea lions, rats and certain primates.
But here it is important to distinguish between several abilities.
An animal may react to a repeating sound, remember a time interval or move approximately at the tempo of a recording. However, this does not necessarily mean that it extracts an abstract musical pulse, predicts the next beat and is capable of transferring the pattern it has found to unfamiliar compositions and new speeds.
Some animals demonstrate impressive forms of rhythmic synchronization. But the number of species studied is still small, and the methods used vary significantly.
Therefore, it would be incorrect to claim that other animals do not feel rhythm at all. However, it is in humans that the combination of several capabilities has been most convincingly shown: flexibly finding a musical pulse, predicting its continuation, and coordinating movements with it when the tempo changes.
Our uniqueness may lie not in a single unique mechanism, but in the unusually close interaction of hearing, prediction, movement, learning, and pleasure.
From sound to movement
Haden and Honing propose a hypothesis that they call gradual audiomotor evolution with reward — Gradual Audiomotor Evolution with Reward, or GAER.
This is a model of how the ability to feel a musical pulse could have formed step by step.
First, the nervous system learned to notice the repeatability of events. This helped predict what was happening and react in a timely manner.
Then, auditory and motor processes began to interact more closely. The heard temporal structure began to prepare movement even before it occurred.
Finally, synchronization could have merged with the reward system. Moving together turned out to be not only possible and useful, but also pleasant — one wanted to repeat it.
Thus, the sense of a musical pulse could have emerged not as a suddenly appearing separate gift, but as the result of the gradual integration of several abilities.
Hearing detects order. The brain predicts the continuation. The body prepares the movement. Pleasure encourages reliving this experience — including together with others.
Why we are drawn to dance together
When people walk, clap, sing, or dance in the same rhythm, a coordination arises between them that requires no detailed verbal instructions.
Each person retains their own body, character, and way of moving, but simultaneously relates them to a common temporal structure. A person does not dissolve into the group — they become a unique part of a jointly created pattern.
Perhaps that is why rhythm is present in lullabies, prayers, work songs, festive dances and collective ceremonies of the most diverse cultures.
It allows many people to organize their movements for a time around a single internal measure of time.
Music does not force human hearts to contract literally at the same rate, nor does it turn the brains of the participants into a single system. But it creates a shared temporal space within which it becomes easier for people to move, interact and experience what is happening in a coordinated way.
Why pleasure matters
If rhythm were only a mechanism for counting time, dance would resemble the working of a clock. But music makes us want to move.
This is especially noticeable in the sensation of groove — an almost bodily urge to pick up the rhythm. It often appears where order meets a slight violation of expectations: the pulse remains clear, but the music does not become mechanical and fully predictable.
A pattern that is too simple quickly loses tension. One that is too complex does not allow one to find the beat with confidence. Between them a space of play arises — the brain recognizes the structure and at the same time takes pleasure in its unexpected turns.
We do not simply follow the music. We enter into a dialogue with it.
It creates expectation, violates it — and again helps us find our footing.
What the review actually established
It is important to understand that the new work is a critical review, not a single experiment giving a definitive answer.
The authors compared studies of different animal species, people of various ages, and results obtained using dissimilar methods. Therefore the review primarily structures the scientific discussion and shows which questions still require verification.
Its most cautious conclusions can be formulated as follows:
- sensitivity to temporal regularity is found not only in humans;
- some foundations of the perception of a musical pulse manifest already in newborns;
- certain animals are capable of coordinating movements with sound;
- the human ability to flexibly find the pulse, predict the beat and adapt to changes in tempo still remains especially developed;
- this ability could have formed thanks to the gradual interaction of hearing, movement, learning and the reward system.
Testing the GAER hypothesis will require new studies of animals under comparable experimental conditions. It is especially important to understand whether other species can transfer a detected pulse to unfamiliar rhythms and freely adapt to a changing tempo.
Rhythm as a form of connection
Music begins with a physical vibration.
A string is set in motion, a membrane responds to a strike, the air carries the sound wave — and a change in pressure turns into perception, expectation, emotion and movement of the body.
Rhythmic processes also exist within a person. The heart contracts, breathing alternates inhalation and exhalation, and neural activity forms interacting temporal patterns.
These internal processes do not have to coincide literally with the tempo of a composition. But upon hearing a musical structure, the brain can build an expectation and prepare movement for the next beat.
Thus a connection arises between external sound and a person's internal organization.
Music does not merely reach the ear — it engages attention, memory, prediction, movement and pleasure. The body ceases to be an outside observer and becomes a participant in what is happening.
The next beat is already sounding within us
At first glance the sense of rhythm seems entirely natural. We turn on music — and within a few moments we find its pulse.
But behind this simple movement hides an extremely complex process.
The brain extracts order from the alternation of sounds and pauses, retains it during silence, predicts the continuation and prepares the body for an event that has not yet occurred.
The next beat has not yet sounded, but many people are already directing their movements toward a single point in time. Each person hears the music through their own body, experience and state — and yet a shared rhythm allows different movements to become parts of a single living pattern.
Perhaps that is why it can be so hard for us to remain still when music is playing. Meeting its pulse, a person does not simply react to an external signal. They respond to it with their own movement — and between sound and body a pattern arises that did not exist before.
Music does not erase individuality. It creates a space in which many dissimilar rhythms can meet and find coherence.
The musical beat has not yet sounded, and the body is already ready to meet it. Perhaps this is the mystery of rhythm: the world is set in motion — and a person recognizes in that movement the possibility of their own dance.
