Rhythm, meter, and tempo in the evolution of human music: a new synthesis.

This preprint proposes a cross-cultural model of the evolution of human musical timing by clarifying the relationships among rhythm, meter, tempo, and beat perception as partially autonomous but interdependent dimensions of temporal organization. While music theory, ethnomusicology, psychoacoustics, and cognitive science frequently employ overlapping terminology, the conceptual distinctions among beat perception, metric structure, rhythmic patterning, and tempo regulation remain insufficiently specified. Drawing on cross-cultural evidence from music theory, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, linguistic prosody, psychoacoustics, anthropology, archaeology, organology, and movement studies, the paper identifies rhythm, meter, and tempo as nearly universal components of musical systems whose organization depends on different types of beat (unitary, binary, foot-based, syllable-based, breath-based, instrumental-technique-based, and body-motion-based). Each beat type generates distinct typologies of meter and tempo across cultures. By tracing genre functionality and structural transformation through historical and prehistoric contexts, the study outlines a diachronic framework for understanding the evolution of musical timing. The model has implications for theories of temporal perception, music cognition, linguistic prosody, psychoacoustics, the anthropology of music, and cross-cultural communication. Supplementary materials (audio, video, and bibliography) are included in the associated archive. This preprint corresponds to a manuscript currently under peer review.