The inability of young children to reproduce intensity differences in musical rhythms

Abstract

A musical rhythm can be described in terms of both its temporal and its dynamic structure. However, although 6-year-old children are able to perceive and reproduce simple temporalstructures, even 8-year-olds rarely reproduce intensity differences. Four experiments on the perception and reproduction of musical rhythms by 5-to Syear-old children demonstrate that even though dynamic structure is clearly dominated by its temporal support, intensity differences playa role in reinforcing the temporal structure. The inability of children to reproduce intensity differences appears to be due neither to an inability to control the intensity of their tap responses nor to the fact that they cannot perceive such changes in intensity. Rather, the results seem best interpreted in terms of the allocation of attentional resources. With simple stimulus material (Experiments 1-3), the children focused on temporal information, and only when the processing of temporal information was mastered did they have "enough attention left" to direct it to intensity differences (Experiment 2). With more complex orchestral music (Experiment 4), attention was primarily allocated to the dynamic structure.Psychologists concerned with the perception of music have tended to concentrate on either melodic or temporal aspects of the auditory sequence. The last few years, however, have seen the appearance of studies of the relation between the two, with two main explanations emerging. As for the first, Jones (1976, 1987) has proposed a model of perceptual interaction, in which perceived temporal structure affects pitch structure by guiding attention to the pitch events that coincide with stressed temporal events. Some empirical support for this model has been provided by Deutsch (1982) and Jones, Boltz, and Kidd (1982). The second explanation suggests, on the contrary, that temporal and pitch information could be perceived independently. Krurnhansl (1987a, 1987b) have presented some empirical evidence which indicates that the perceived dimensions are processed separately, with the listeners attending to one stimulus dimension at the expense of the other. Studies involving factorial analysis of discrimination tasks (Gabriels son, 1973;Monahan & Carterette, 1985) also describe two orthogonal factors (rhythm and pitch), with the former being more fundamental. The idea of independent processing has also been developed by Thomas and Weaver (1975), who proposed two information processing systems, one responsible for analyzing temporal information and anThe authors are grateful to G. Vallee, F. Leprince, and C. Basso for collecting part of the data. They wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticisms, M. C. Bolte for her help in controlling the stimuli and her comments on the paper, and W. Jay Dowling, L. 91other responsible for analyzing the characteristics of the sound, such as intensity or pitch.In this paper, we examine a similar question concerning the perception of musical rhythm. In the same way as the dependence or independence o...

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Skill Development in Rhythm Perception and Performance: A Review of Literature

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“…Los niños de 6 arios integran correctamente secuencias isócronas en las que los acentos aparecen en uno de cada dos golpes o en uno de cada tres, y reproducen correctamente estas secuencias con diferentes velocidades. Pero cuando las secuencias no son isócronas no se produce la acentuación: los niños centran su atención en la organización temporal, aunque se les pida explícitamente que presten atención a los acentos (Gerard y Drake, 1990). Por eso es por lo que nosotros en este experimento nos hemos contentado con un sólo acento situado en cualquier lugar.…”