The role of accent salience and joint accent structure in meter perception.

Abstract

Previous research indicates that temporal accents (TAs; accents due to time changes) play a strong role in meter perception, but evidence favoring a role for melodic accents (MAs; accents due to pitch changes) is mixed. The authors claim that this mixed support for MAs is the result of a failure to control for accent salience and addressed this hypothesis in Experiment 1. Listeners rated the metrical clarity of 13-tone melodies in which the magnitude and pattern of MAs and TAs were varied. Results showed that metrical clarity increased with both MA and TA magnitude. In Experiment 2, listeners were asked to rate metrical clarity in melodies with combinations of MA and TA patterns to allow the authors to ascertain whether these two accent types combined additively or interactively in meter perception. With respect to the additive or interactive debate, the findings highlighted the importance of (a) accent salience, (b) scoring methods, and (c) conceptual versus statistical interpretations of data. Implications for dynamic attending and neuropsychological investigations are discussed.

The Integration of Stimulus Dimensions in the Perception of Music

“…Much research on pitch-time integration has taken a position supporting either the idea that pitch and time are independent, or interactive (as reviewed in Ellis & Jones, 2009, Krumhansl, 2000). Palmer and Krumhansl (1987a) provided one of the landmark demonstrations of independence, where an additive combination of pitch and temporal information predicted judgments of melodic phrase goodness, suggesting that pitch and time were processed separately.…”

Do metrical accents create illusory phenomenal accents?

“…For example, Povel (1984) and Povel and Essens (1985) developed a well-known theory of how perception of a beat is induced by a rhythmic pattern containing only temporal (grouping) accents created by the durations of intervals between events. More recently, Hannon, Snyder, Eerola, and Krumhansl (2004) and Ellis and Jones (2009), among others, have conducted detailed investigations of the relative importance of temporal and melodic (pitch) accents in the perceptual induction of meter. Meter consists of at least two hierarchically nested levels of beats, one of which (the main beat, or tactus) is most salient.…”

La notion de “saillance” dans le langage parlé – comment les structures proéminentes façonnent la compréhension du discours

“…19 In (psycho)acoustic research, salience is often used synonymous to prominence in order to identify an event or element that stands out from the context (Ellis & Jones, 2009;Kohler, 2008). In this paper, however, both terms will be used for separate phenomena.…”