Search

It is now widely accepted that the brunt of animal communication is conducted via several modalities, e.g. acoustic and visual, either simultaneously or sequentially. This is a laudable multimodal turn relative to traditional accounts of temporal aspects of animal communication which have focused on a single modality at a time. However, the fields that are currently contributing to the study of multimodal communication are highly varied, and still largely disconnected given their sole focus on a particular level of description or their particular concern with human or non-human animals. Here, we provide an integrative overview of converging findings that show how multimodal processes occurring at neural, bodily, as well as social interactional levels each contribute uniquely to the complex rhythms that characterize communication in human and non-human animals. Though we address findings for each of these levels independently, we conclude that the most important challenge in this field is to identify how processes at these different levels connect. This article is part of the theme issue 'Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moving to music is intuitive and spontaneous, and music is widely used to support movement, most commonly during exercise. Auditory cues are increasingly also used in the rehabilitation of disordered movement, by aligning actions to sounds such as a metronome or music. Here, the effect of rhythmic auditory cueing on movement is discussed and representative findings of cued movement rehabilitation are considered for several movement disorders, specifically post-stroke motor impairment, Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease. There are multiple explanations for the efficacy of cued movement practice. Potentially relevant, non-mutually exclusive mechanisms include the acceleration of learning; qualitatively different motor learning owing to an auditory context; effects of increased temporal skills through rhythmic practices and motivational aspects of musical rhythm. Further considerations of rehabilitation paradigm efficacy focus on specific movement disorders, intervention methods and complexity of the auditory cues. Although clinical interventions using rhythmic auditory cueing do not show consistently positive results, it is argued that internal mechanisms of temporal prediction and tracking are crucial, and further research may inform rehabilitation practice to increase intervention efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]