Listeners perceive complex pitch-temporal structure in melodies

Abstract

In typical Western music, important pitches occur disproportionately often on important beats, referred to as the tonal-metric hierarchy (Prince & Schmuckler, 2014, Music Perception, 31, 254-270). We tested whether listeners are sensitive to this alignment of pitch and temporal structure. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were 200 artificial melodies with random pitch contours; all melodies had both a regular beat and a pitch class distribution that favored one musical key, but had either high or low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Thirty-two listeners rated the goodness of each melody, and another 41 listeners rated the melodies' metric clarity (how clear the beat was). The tonal-metric hierarchy did not affect either rating type, likely because the melodies may have only weakly (at best) established a musical key. In Experiment 2, we shuffled the pitches in 60 composed melodies (scrambling pitch contour, but not rhythm) to generate versions with high and low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Both ratings of goodness (N = 40) and metric clarity (N = 40) revealed strong evidence of the tonal-metric hierarchy influencing ratings; there was no effect of musical training. In Experiment 3, we phase-shifted, rather than shuffled, the pitches from the composed melodies, thus preserving pitch contour. Both rating types (goodness N = 43, metric clarity N = 32) replicated the results of Experiment 2. These findings establish the psychological reality of the tonal-metric hierarchy.

Music-selective cortex is sensitive to structure in both pitch and time

“…Within the field of music cognition, there is longstanding interest in the degree to which the processing of pitch and temporal information is integrated. Corpus studies have confirmed that a reliable relationship exists between tonal and metrical hierarchies in music, such that important pitches occur on prominent beats (Prince and Schmuckler, 2014), and that listeners are sensitive to the joint distribution of pitch and temporal information (Prince et al, 2020). Consistent with this idea, some studies have found that listeners treat melody and rhythm as a unified dimension in perception and memory, such that changes to one dimension affect melodic expectancy and goodness-of-fit judgements in the other dimension (Schmuckler and Boltz, 1994; Prince et al, 2009; Prince, 2011), as well as performance on change detection and same/different tasks (Jones et al, 1982; Kidd et al, 1984) and even basic judgements of duration (Crowder and Neath, 1995).…”

“…Within the field of music cognition, there is longstanding interest in the degree to which the processing of pitch and temporal information is integrated. Corpus studies have confirmed that a reliable relationship exists between tonal and metrical hierarchies in music, such that important pitches occur on prominent beats (Prince and Schmuckler, 2014), and that listeners are sensitive to the joint distribution of pitch and temporal information (Prince et al, 2020).…”

Temporal hierarchies in the predictive processing of melody − From pure tones to songs

“…Bigand (1997) reported that a combination of harmonic, rhythmic and pitch-related factors determined the perceived stability of sounds in melodies. Similarly, Prince and Schmuckler (2014) found that important pitches tend to occur in metrically important positions, a phenomenon termed "tonal-metric" hierarchy which was found to affect goodness and metric clarity ratings in listeners (Prince et al, 2020). This evidence suggests that predictive processing in rhythm influences predictive processing in pitch and vice-versa.…”

Commentary on David Temperley's "Melodic Pattern Repetition and Efficient Encoding: A Corpus Study"

“…For example, when I was working on a corpus study demonstrating the alignment of tonality and meter (Prince & Schmuckler, 2014), I wanted to know if this pattern was meaningful in a perceptual sense -that is, would listeners be sensitive to manipulations of the tonal-metric hierarchy? This led to behavioral work in which I used a phase-shifting approach to show that listeners rated sequences that preserved the tonal-metric hierarchy as better melodies than those that disturbed this alignment (Prince et al, 2020). The same question applies to the principles that Temperley reveals in his article; accordingly, he touches on this issue at the end of the Discussion (positing a "complex process of back-and-forth influence between composition and perception", p. 112).…”