Perception of Simple Rhythmic Patterns in a Network of Oscillators

This paper is concerned with the complex capacity to recognize and reproduce rhythmic patterns. While this capacity has not been well investigated, in broad qualitative terms it is clear that people can learn to identify and produce recurring patterns defined in terms of sequences of beats of varying intensity and rests: the rhythms behind waltzes, reels, sambas, etc. Our short term goal is a model which is "hard-wired" with knowledge of a set of such patterns. Presented with a portion of one of the patterns or a label for a pattern, the model should reproduce the pattern and continue to do so when the input is turned off. Our long-term goal is a model which can learn to adjust the connection strengths which implement particular patterns as it is exposed to input patterns.