Rhythm Tapping Game

About Rhythm

Rhythm plays a steady pulse a few times, as a circle that lights up and a short click if your sound is on. Then the pulse stops and a big TAP button becomes active. Your job is to tap at the exact moment the next beat would have come, continuing the rhythm in your head.

The pace changes from round to round, between about half a second and one and a quarter seconds per beat. On harder levels there are only four beats to listen to, and one beat is left silent before the one you have to hit, so you keep the rhythm alive for two full steps. It sounds simple, but a tap that is 100 milliseconds off already feels clearly wrong, and the game shows you your error to the millisecond.

How to play

1. Watch and listen to the beats. The circle lights up on every beat, and a click sounds if effects are on.
2. When the beats stop, keep counting the rhythm silently. On higher levels the prompt tells you that one beat stays silent.
3. Tap the button, or press the space bar, at the moment the next beat should come.
4. The result shows how many milliseconds early or late you were. Negative means early, positive late.

A circle pulses to a steady beat, then stops. Tap the big button at the moment the next beat would have come. On harder levels one beat is silent first.

How scoring works

The score is 100 for a perfect tap and falls in a straight line to 0 at the tolerance. The tolerance is half of the beat interval on level 1 and about 28 percent of it on level 10, with a minimum of 120 milliseconds. At a pace of 800 ms per beat on level 1 you have 400 ms either way; on level 10 about 224 ms.

The time is measured from the screen flash of your last visible beat, with the touch or key event time of your tap. There is no penalty for tapping early, only for being off the beat in either direction. If you do not tap in time, the round ends with 0 points.

What it trains

Rhythm trains sensorimotor synchronization, the ability to coordinate movement with an internal or external beat. It is the basis of dancing, drumming, clapping along, walking in step and speaking in cadence. It also supports plain skills such as sports timing, typing and catching.

Keeping a beat in your head after the stimulus stops is a particularly clean test of your internal pacemaker, because no external beat can correct you.

Tips for a higher score

• Move with the beat: nod your head, tap your foot or pulse your thumb. Movement stabilizes your sense of rhythm, and most musicians do this.
• Think of the beat as a subdivision, such as counting 'one-and-two-and', when the interval is slow. It splits the long gap into smaller steps that are easier to keep.
• Tap with a relaxed hand. The delay of a tense, hard press adds to the error.
• Aim for the middle of the expected moment. On phones the touch response adds a few milliseconds, so try to be consistent instead of trying to be early.
• If your sound is on, close your eyes to focus on the clicks. Many people find audio clicks easier to time than light flashes.

The idea behind it

Research on tapping to a metronome shows a robust effect called negative mean asynchrony: when people tap along to a beat, they usually tap slightly ahead of it, by about 20 to 50 milliseconds on average. Musicians show smaller values than untrained people. The effect has been replicated many times since the work of Paul Fraisse and Bruno Repp.

Keeping a beat after it stops, known as continuation tapping, is part of the classic Wing and Kristofferson timing model from 1973, in which a central clock and a motor delay each add noise. The variability grows with the interval, which is the reason the game's tolerance grows with the beat length.

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