Practice Makes Perfect: Beat Perception is Enhanced by Musical Training Not Active Music Playing

The ability to perceive the beat in music is crucial for both music listeners and players with expert musicians being notably skilled at noticing fine deviations in the beat. However, it is unclear whether this beat perception ability remains stable once trained or whether it diminishes with disuse. Thus, we investigated this by comparing active musicians’, inactive musicians’, and nonmusicians’ beat perception ability scores on the Computerised Adaptive Beat Alignment Test (CA-BAT). 97 adults with diverse musical experience participated in the study, reporting their years of musical training, number of instruments played, hours of weekly music playing, and hours of weekly music listening, in addition to their demographic information. The analysis showed that there was no significant difference between active musicians’, inactive musicians’, and nonmusicians’ CA-BAT scores once differences in musical training had been accounted for. Regression analysis confirmed that years of musical training was the only significant predictor of beat perception ability. These results suggest that expertly perceiving fine differences in the beat is not a use-dependent ability that degrades without regular maintenance through practice or musical engagement. Instead, beat perception appears to be a stable ability once sufficiently trained.