Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 44, Issue 3, 1992, Pages 241-281
Cognition

Probing the cognitive representation of musical time: Structural constraints on the perception of timing perturbations

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(92)90003-ZGet rights and content

Abstract

To determine whether structural factors interact with the perception of musical time, musically literate listeners were presented repeatedly with eight-bar musical excerpts, realized with physically regular timing on an electronic piano. On each trial, one or two randomly chosen time intervals were lengthened by a small amount, and the listeners had to detect these “hesitations” and mark their positions in the score. The resulting detection accuracy profile across all positions in each musical excerpt showed pronounced dips in places where lenghtening would typically occur in an expressive (temporally modulated) performance. False alarm percentages indicated that certain tones seemed longer a priori, and these were among the ones whose actual lenghtening was easiest to detect. The detection accuracy and false alarm profiles were significantly correlated with each other and with the temporal microstructure of expert performances, as measured from sound recordings by famous artists. Thus the detection task apparently tapped into listeners' musical thought and revealed their expectations about the temporal microstructure of music performance. These expectations, like the timing patterns of actual performances, derive from the cognitive representation of musical structure, as cued by a variety of systemic factors (grouping, meter, harmonic progression) and their acoustic correlates. No simple psycho-acoustic explanation of the detection accuracy profiles was evident. The results suggest that the perception of musical time is not veridical but “warped” by the structural representation. This warping may provide a natural basis for performance evaluation: expected timing patterns sound more or less regular, unexpected ones irregular. Parallels to language performance and perception are noted.

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    This research was supported by NIH grant RR-05596 to Haskins Laboratories. Some of the results were presented at the 121st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Baltimore, MD, and at the “Resonant Intervals” Interdisciplinary Music Conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, both in May 1991. For helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, I am grateful to Carol Fowler, Carol Krumhansl, Mari Riess Jones, and two anonymous reviewers. Additional insights were provided by Patrick Shove in many discussions.

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