Listeners lengthen phrase boundaries in self-paced music.

Abstract

1Previous work has shown that musicians tend to slow down as they approach phrase boundaries 2 (phrase-final lengthening). In the present experiments, we used a paradigm from the action 3 perception literature, the dwell time paradigm (Hard, Recchia, & Tversky, 2011), to investigate 4 whether participants engage in phrase boundary lengthening when self-pacing through musical 5 sequences. When participants used a key press to produce each successive chord of Bach 6 chorales, they dwelled longer on boundary chords than non-boundary chords in both the original 7 chorales and atonal manipulations of the chorales. When a novel musical sequence was 8 composed that controlled for metrical and melodic contour cues to boundaries, the dwell time 9 difference between boundaries and non-boundaries was greater in the tonal condition than in the 10 atonal condition. Furthermore, similar results were found for a group of non-musicians, 11suggesting that phrase-final lengthening in musical production is not dependent on musical 12 training and can be evoked by harmonic cues. 13 LISTENERS LENGTHEN BOUNDARIES IN SELF-PACED MUSIC 4Listeners Lengthen Phrase Boundaries in Self-Paced Music 1 Across perceptual domains, parsing events into groups as they unfold across time helps to 2 consolidate low-level information and to focus attention on structurally important features 3 (Chiappe & Schmuckler, 1997;Deutsch, 1980;Dowling, 1973;Large & Jones, 1999; Miller, 4 1956;Zacks & Swallow, 2007). Accurate parsing of real world auditory streams requires 5 separating two or more co-occurring streams (stream segregation) as well as grouping elements 6 in a stream across time (stream integration) (Bregman, 1990). A sequence of musical events can 7 be grouped into phrases. A musical phrase is a subset of contiguous notes that culminates in a 8 musical boundary. Students of music theory commonly learn about the features that Western 9 composers use to indicate a boundary, and phrasing is often indicated in musical notation. Thus, 10 musicians have explicit knowledge of phrase structures. Previous studies have shown that 11 musicians tend to lengthen notes at the ends of phrases (phrase-final lengthening, Palmer, 1989; 12 Repp, 1992a;Seashore, 1938;Todd, 1985). The current study employs a paradigm from the field 13 of action segmentation, the dwell time paradigm, to examine whether participants, including 14 non-musicians, engage in phrase-final lengthening when they control the timing of chord 15 sequences. We additionally investigate whether listeners use harmonic cues (cadences) to 16 determine phrase boundary locations, by examining whether phrase-final lengthening is larger 17 for tonal than atonal chord sequences when other cues such as metrical (rhythmic) structure and 18 melodic contour cues are reduced. Finally, we examine whether non-musicians with minimal 19 musical training also exhibit phrase-final lengthening and use harmonic cues to locate phrase 20 endings. In this way, we offer a novel method for probing listeners' ...

CLEESE: An open-source audio-transformation toolbox for data-driven experiments in speech and music cognition

“…This is consistent with previous findings showing that expressive timing typically involving a shortening of the short notes, and a lengthening of the long notes of a melody [49]. Second, both musicians and non-musicians had similarly shortened representations for the duration of the last note (♩ ♩ ♩ → ♩ ♩ ♩ ♪), a pattern is at odds with the note-final lengthening reported for non-musicians in a self-paced listening paradigm [51], but consistent with the lengthening of the last-but-one inter-onset-interval found in professional pianists [49, 56]. Finally, the analysis revealed a significant interaction of time index and participant musicianship: F(5, 40) = 2.5, p = .045.…”

“…However, the cognitive structures that govern a participant’s representation of the rhythm of a given musical passage are difficult to uncover with experimental methods. In [50], it was accessed indirectly by measuring the ability to detect timing errors inserted at different positions in a phrase; in [51], participants were asked to manually advance through a sequence of musical chords with a key press, and the time dwelt on each successive chord was used to quantify how fast they internally represented the corresponding musical time. Here, we give a proof of concept of how to use CLEESE in a reverse-correlation experiment to uncover what temporal contour drives participants’ judgement of a rhythmically competent/accurate rendition of the well-known song Happy birthday .…”

Nonmusicians Express Emotions in Musical Productions Using Conventional Cues

“…In the present study, we used a simple self-pacing apparatus to examine the use of expressive cues in musical production across non-expert undergraduate performers with different levels of formal music training. A similar apparatus has been used in previous self-pacing studies to examine expressive timing and musical phrase structure in nonmusicians and preschool children (Kragness & Trainor, 2016, 2018). In previous studies, participants controlled the onset of each successive chord in a prescribed musical sequence.…”

Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception

“…None of the participants were professional musicians (for more information about musical-training levels, see Table S1 in the Supplemental Material available online). This sample size exceeds or corresponds to those of previous studies using this methodology to assess comparable effects (e.g., Hard et al, 2011;Kragness & Trainor, 2016. All participants were fluent in English.…”

“…Participants were instructed to progress as quickly or slowly as they liked while listening carefully, and they could not repeat previously heard tones. To motivate them to attend to the task, we falsely led them to believe that their memory for the sequences would be tested afterward (Kragness & Trainor, 2016). No other instructions regarding timing, pacing, rhythmicity, or expressivity were given.…”