Reaction time and musical expectancy: Priming of chords.

Pitch and time are two principal form-bearing dimensions in Western tonal music. Research on melody perception has shown that listeners develop expectations about "What" note is coming next and "When" in time it will occur. Our study used sequences of chords (i.e., simultaneously sounding notes) to investigate the influence of these expectations on chord processing (Experiments 1 and 4) and subjective judgments of completion (Experiments 2 and 3). Both tasks showed an influence of tonal relations and temporal regularities: expected events occurring at the expected moment were processed faster and led to higher completion judgments. However, pitch and time dimensions interacted only for completion judgments. The present outcome suggests that for chord perception the influence of pitch and time might depend on the required processing: with a more global judgment favoring interactive influences in contrast to a task focusing on local chord processing.

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Surface and structural effects of pitch and time on global melodic expectancies

Prince

Loo

2016

Psychological Research

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We investigated how the surface and structural information of pitch and time in melodies contribute to the perceived expectancy of melodic segments. The contour (pitch surface), tonality (pitch structure), rhythm (time surface) and metre (time structure) were preserved or altered in factorial fashion, either for the full length of a melody (Full condition) or only its last phrase (Last condition). Participants (N = 24) with a range of musical training received instructions to rate how expected the second portion of a melody was, having heard its first part. Additionally, instructions varied across blocks to attend selectively to pitch, time, or both. Expectancy ratings for the Last condition were lower than for the Full condition, indicating that ratings truly reflected expectancy (rather than overall goodness, which would predict the opposite). Interestingly, tonality and rhythm contributed to global expectancy ratings, but not contour or metre. Furthermore, listeners were unable to ignore entirely either dimension, but successfully attenuated their influence in accordance with instructions. These findings offer a unique insight into music perception by testing expectancies of melody segments (beyond single-note continuations), factorially varying both the surface and structure of pitch and time, and using a selective attention manipulation.

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Reaction time and musical expectancy: Priming of chords.

Cited by 94 publications

References 17 publications

Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology

Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology

Influence of tonal and temporal expectations on chord processing and on completion judgments of chord sequences

Surface and structural effects of pitch and time on global melodic expectancies

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