Within the metaverse a tendency exists towards a seamless and intuitive interaction in the virtual world by an immersive and interactive environment. Capturing user sensation and experience during the interaction can help to build and maintain this immersion in any interaction, including music and rhythm. Here, besides physical user inputs, brain monitoring and bio-synchronization, can be a relevant tool for user analysis of the experience.

For example, neural entrainment, being the unidirectional synchronization of neural oscillations to an external rhythmic stimulus, provides a pathway to studying these interactions and help characterizing them. Nevertheless, despite being a topic of major interest in neuroscience, correct non-invasive quantification of the entrainment and defining the emotion, experience and sensation without providing misinterpretation seem difficult.

In this poster an experiment and pilot data are presented aimed at exploring potential brain markers in relation to synchronicity of a performance and associated questionnaire responses to identify bio-indicators of a good human-rhythm interaction and through it identify entrainment and user experience.

A finger-taping experiment with variable beat patterns will be conducted on a cohort of 15 subjects where a subject synchronizes its tapping to the auditory presented rhythm or a variation of it. Here, both spectral band activity and the low rhythm-frequency content of the EEG activity will be evaluated locally in time and across the experiment. Two spatial filters, based on localizer trials, will allow separation of sensorimotor and perceptual activity to study their response separately. The quality of the rhythm interaction quality is defined on the basis of the physical performance, questionnaires and additionally builds on the theory of human embodiment within music interaction.