People are very good at moving in time to a beat. When you listen to your favorite song, you will probably find yourself nodding your head or tapping your foot along almost instinctively.




When you’re doing it in a club, you’re depending a lot on your DJ. DJs have to mix two songs together to maintain a common beat between the tracks to keep the audience dancing. If the DJs do a bad job with the mix, the two beat lines from each song won’t blend into each other. The most likely result of such a faux pas? An instantly empty dance floor.




We’ve been investigating how closely matched two beat lines need to be for people to start moving in time to them as if they form a common beat. In other words, how accurate does a DJ need to be to make a seamless transition between songs?




We asked people to tap their finger in time to two metronomes played simultaneously. The separation between the two metronomes and the consistency (the predictability of the rhythms) was varied across the experiment.




We found that if the metronomes were very consistent, they had to be closely matched in time for them to be considered a common beat. But if the beats of the individual metronomes were inconsistent and less predictable, the separation between the beats could be larger while still being considered to form a single common beat.




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