Abstract
If time-marking events constitute a temporal pattern as in music, they are often perceived as being played at a particular tempo, lending a sense of "rhythm keeping." The present study examined how actual event timing in drum phrases would affect the formation of this impression. A sense of rhythm keeping was derived even with physically non-isochronous patterns if some beats were subdivided by markers. This tolerance for timing deviations varied along the base tempo of the phrases, being only partially consistent with the prediction from the conventional illusion of a divided time interval. These results were discussed in terms of the processing of time intervals and sequences of them.
