Abstract. From all hidden assumptions behind the models of musicalmeter and rhythm, the notion that all individuals understand theperiodic structure of music in the same way might be the mostintractable and risky one. A number of evidences show that musicalcultures differ in a number of aspects including cognitive priorities,musical function and relationships between music, movement anddance. From the methodological point of view, it is very difficult todescribe the understanding of rhythm structures: tapping methods arelimiting and biased, surveys can be too subjective and analyses ofperformances are ambiguous and multivariate. From the point of viewof culture, cultural preferences may be subtle and comparisonsbetween contrasting cultures might be unreliable. In this study werealize cross-cultural comparisons between free movement responsesto musical cultures of samba and chacarera music, executed byBrazilian and Argentinian acculturated subjects. We use methods thattrack the density of kinematic events in the metrical grid at each levelof the metrical structure. The results contrast to traditional models ofmetric structure by exposing an intrinsic diversity, variability andasymmetry of movement responses. The results also showmorphological characteristics connected to cultural differences.