phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at o:3938 DOI 10.1111/joa.14200 Rhythmic categories in horse gait kinematics Anecdotally, horses' gaits sound rhythmic. Are they really? In this study, we quantified the motor rhythmicity of horses across three different gaits (walk, trot, and canter). For the first time, we adopted quantitative tools from bioacoustics and music cognition to quantify locomotor rhythmicity. Specifically, we tested whether kinematics data contained rhythmic categories; these occur when adjacent temporal intervals are categorically, rather than randomly, distributed. We extracted the motion cycle duration (tk) of two ipsilateral hooves from motion data of 13 ridden horses and calculated the ratios from two successive tk values. We tested whether these ratios significantly fell within rhythmic categories and quantified how close they were to small-integer ratios, a rhythmic feature also present in animal vocalizations and human music. We found a strong isochronous pattern-a 1:1 rhythmic ratio, corresponding to the ticking of a clock-in the motion of single limbs for all gaits. We also analyzed the interlimb coordination of the two ipsilateral hooves' impacts to identify differences associated with the biomechanical patterns of the three gaits. We found an interlimb 1:1 rhythmic pattern for trot and 1:3 and 3:1 rhythmic categories for walk and canter. Our findings are a first step toward quantifying rhythmicity in horse locomotion and potentially the resulting rhythmic sounds, with possible implications as tools to detect gait irregularities. Overall, we show that rhythmic categories are a valuable tool for gait kinematic analysis and that they can be used to quantify temporal patterns in the motor domain. eng Animals Horse Physiology Biomechanical Phenomena Gait Physiology Periodicity Male Female 2025-03-13T09:44:33.628Z LOMv1.0 Author BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Laffi;Lia; FN:Lia Laffi X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0009-0003-6083-9596 END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Bigand;Félix; FN:Félix Bigand END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Peham;Christian; FN:Christian Peham X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8363-5751 END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Novembre;Giacomo; FN:Giacomo Novembre END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Gamba;Marco; FN:Marco Gamba END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Ravignani;Andrea; FN:Andrea Ravignani X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1058-0024 END:VCARD https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/scheme https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/text Textdokument Text LOMv1.0 yes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 application/pdf 2339622 https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/o:3938 https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/api/object/o:3938/thumbnail LOMv1.0 discipline