One function of music is considered to be defining social identity for oneself and for others. This aspect of musical styles was investigated in the light of Social Identity Theory by examining how a college student population described fans of different musical styles. Respondents were questioned about their perception of listeners of six musical styles, two of which were indigenous to Turkey. Three basic dimensions that described the listeners of these styles emerged as the result of factor and scale reliability analyses. These dimensions were labelled the sophisticated, the sprightly, and the loser. Respondents associated these features with fans of different styles to different extents. The sprightly dimension characterized listeners of pop, rock, and rap best. The sophisticated dimension was most closely associated with listeners of classical and Turkish folk music. Listening to Arabesk, which is a style that is specific to Turkey, was most closely associated with the loser dimension. Consistent with the predictions of Social Identity Theory, evaluations by a person were affected by the attitude of that person towards a style in the cases of rock and Turkish folk music. Especially on the sophisticated dimension, respondents who liked rock or Turkish folk music rated the listeners of these styles closer to the ideal than respondents who disliked them. However, the self‐evaluations of these groups were similar. Furthermore, respondents typically described themselves as being closer to the ideal value on the three dimensions than the listeners of musical styles they liked. These results provide considerable support for the idea that liking a musical style shows characteristics of group membership according to Social Identity Theory.

The time course of chord priming was explored in four experiments. In chord priming, a chord (a typical combination of simultaneously sounded tones) primes other chords that are musically related. In the present study, the prime duration and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the prime chord and the chord to be judged were varied. Priming occurred at an SOA and prime duration as short as 50 msec, the shortest tested. When the prime duration was held constant at 50 msec, priming occurred at an SOA as long as 2,500 msec, the longest tested, and the magnitude of the priming effect did not diminish. To eliminate a possible role of sensory memory in maintaining the priming effect during the silence following the prime, a 250·msec noise mask was presented immediately following the 50-msec prime. The interpolated noise mask did not eliminate priming, thereby supporting the view that chord priming is the consequence of associative activation.

Stylistic knowledge is one of many ways in which listeners may respond to musical styles. As a form of conceptual knowledge, stylistic knowledge has multiple facets. We examined stylistic knowledge of a college student population in Turkey by questioning them about how similar they thought different styles were, which descriptive qualities they associated with different styles of music, and for what reasons people would listen to different styles. We discovered that our respondents represented the similarity among musical styles in a systematic way that could be described by a small number of dimensions. There was also considerable consensus on how musical styles and reasons for listening to them could be described. Musical styles were described with reference to an evaluative, an activity, and a peacefulness dimension. Reasons for listening could be subsumed under four factors: background, movement, identity, and appreciation. Musical styles differed in how closely they were associated with these descriptive dimensions and reasons for listening. How the styles were perceived was also affected by the stylistic preferences of the respondents.

If one dimension of sound is manipulated in a way that suggests a particular rhythmic organization, does perception of other dimensions change in ways that are consistent with the same rhythmic organization? When subjects were asked to judge or adjust intensities of tones, rhythmic manipulations of pitch structure changed the perception of intensity. When subjects were asked to judge timing, rhythmic manipulations of intensity had a similar effect. Timing manipulations did not have an effect on judgments of pitch. The results indicate that temporal structure as a whole is more accessible than the individual physical manipulations that give rise to that structure. It may be concluded that the temporal structure itself, rather than pitches, intensities, and durations in isolation, is a perceptual object.

The effect of intensity and pitch accents on the perception of timing was examined in two experiments using a signal detection procedure. Analyses of sensitivity and response bias revealed opposite effects of intensity and pitch accents under similar conditions. Time intervals preceding intensity accents were perceived as longer, but time intervals preceding pitch accents were perceived as shorter. These results showed that listeners found it easier to detect timing variations that were contrary to expectations, as compared with variations that were consistent with expectations. In the present case, listeners should have expected shorter time intervals before intensity accents and longer intervals before pitch accents. The fact that the effects were observed with stimuli that had minimal musical structure demonstrated the contribution of psychoacoustic factors to such phenomena.