Perceiving the initial note: Quantitative models of how listeners parse cyclical auditory patterns

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the rules followed by the auditory system in grouping temporal patterns. Imagine

Competition between Rhythmic and Linguistic Meaning Revisited: The Effect of Task Demands

“…This was done for two reasons: (a) to not give an advantage to isochronous rhythms (with two potential clasps) over syncopated rhythms (which generally had one potential clasp); (b) to not give an advantage to the necklace clasp (with two potential positions) over the sentence clasp (with only one potential position). Most often, the modal clasp was the clasp chosen based on the gap principle, as the gap principle tends to be a stronger predictor than the run principle (Yu et al, 2015).…”

“…To prevent a note from being salient because it was the first one heard, the tempo of each AN started extremely fast (SOA = 120 ms; 500 bpm) and decelerated to an SOA = 340 ms (175 bpm) after 20 beats (see Yu et al, 2015). The program randomly picked the first beat for each trial.…”

“…Rhythmic parsing is based on lawful organization principles (Preusser, Garner, & Gottwald, 1970;Royer & Garner, 1966. In earlier research, we studied the quantification of auditory necklaces (ANs)-cyclically repeating isochronous (i.e., evenly spaced in time) rhythmic motifs (Kubovy & Yu, 2012;Yu et al, 2015). We refer to these patterns as necklaces because they are conveniently represented as beads around a circle, as in Figure 1.…”

“…We asked listeners to choose the perceived starting note (which we call the clasp of the necklace) of a variety of isochronous ANs (Yu et al, 2015). Two principles were found to additively predict the rhythmic organization.…”

“…to known laws of grouping (Kubovy & Yu, 2012;Yu et al, 2015). However, when we changed the stimuli to five-word sentences in our sentence-rhythm Stroop task and played with a syncopated rhythm, listeners more frequently chose the sentence clasp.…”