Jon Prince

I report two experiments on the contribution of pitch and temporal cues to metrical grouping. Recent work on this question has revealed a dominance of pitch. Extending this work, a dimensional salience hypothesis predicts that the presence of tonality would influence the relative importance of pitch and time. Experiment 1 establishes baseline values of accents in pitch (pitch leaps) and time (duration accent) that result in equally strong percepts of metrical grouping. Pitch and temporal accents are recombined in Experiment 2 to see which dimension contributes more strongly to metrical grouping (and how). Both experiments test values in tonal and atonal contexts. Both dimensions had strong influences on perceived metric grouping, but pitch was clearly the more dominant. Furthermore, the relative strength of the two dimensions varied based on the tonality of the sequences. Pitch contributed more strongly in the tonal contexts than the atonal, whereas Time was stronger in the atonal contexts than the tonal. These findings are inconsistent with an interpretation that stimulus structure enhances the ability to extract, encode, and use information about an object. Instead, they imply that structure in one dimension can highlight that dimension at the expense of another (i.e., induce dimensional salience).

The perception and production of complex musical sequences was tested, while varying either the number of major diatonic pitches or inter-onset intervals (IOIs), but not both. One group of participants rated the complexity of each sequence (perception). A second group reproduced each sequence on a keyboard and rated the difficulty of production (perception and production). For both dimensions, increasing the number of unique elements in the sequences led to greater perceived complexity, rated difficulty, repetitions, and lower production accuracy. Paradoxically, increases in the number of unique IOIs had a smaller influence on perceived complexity than increases in unique pitches, whereas the opposite effect was found in production. Potential explanations include a perception-action mismatch, and an inferior ability to differentiate between IOIs with increasing temporal complexity.

In typical Western music, pitch often dominates time, perhaps because pitch exhibits more structure. This research tested how varying the amount of structure in these two dimensions affects how pitch and time combine in judgments of melodic goodness. Melodies had either the original sequence of elements, a reordered sequence of existing elements, or a sequence with random elements. This manipulation was used for both dimensions independently, creating a crossed 3 pitch by 3 time conditions design. Participants were instructed to attend only to pitch, time, or both. Despite the selective attention instructions, both dimensions always contributed to goodness ratings. The effect size of pitch was considerably larger than that of time in all cases except for the attend time instruction, in which the main effects were of equal size. The pattern of how pitch and time contributed to ratings differed across instruction. Pitch and time combined independently only when attending time. When attending pitch, the effect of time declined with reduced pitch structure. When attending both pitch and time, the original pitch and time sequence was disproportionately better than other conditions. These results have four implications. First, pitch dominates melodic goodness ratings regardless of the degree of temporal structure. Second, listeners can consciously emphasize either dimension in this context, suggesting some independence between pitch and time on an explicit level. Third, however, listeners cannot ignore entirely either dimension when forming a goodness rating, suggesting some interdependence between pitch and time on an implicit level. Fourth, when attending to both pitch and time simultaneously, the unique combination of the original pitch and temporal elements can affect goodness ratings in an interactive manner. Overall, the combination of pitch and time in music can vary in complex ways based on conscious and involuntary allocation of attention to these two dimensions.

Musical pitch-time relations were explored by investigating the effect of temporal variation on musical pitch processing. In Experiment 1, musicians heard a standard tone, followed by a tonal context, then followed by a comparison tone, and performed one of two tasks. In the cognitive task, listeners were asked to ignore the standard tone and to judge whether the comparison tone was in the key of the context. In the perceptual task, listeners were asked to ignore the context and judge whether the comparison tone was higher or lower in pitch than the earlier standard tone. In both tasks, the comparison tone occurred early, on-time or late with respect to the temporal structure that the context established. Analyses of accuracy in both the cognitive and perceptual tasks failed to reveal any impact of temporal variation on pitch judgments. Experiment 2 used only the perceptual task, and varied the pitch structure by employing either a tonal context or an atonal context of random pitches, and manipulating the temporal placement of the comparison tone. Like Experiment 1, temporal variation had no effect on pitch height judgments for tonal contexts; however this variation influenced accuracy for atonal contexts. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 2 but also controlled several potentially confounding factors. We argue that tonal contexts bias listeners’ attention toward pitch, thus eliminating effects of temporal variation, whereas atonal contexts do not favor pitch and thus foster pitch-time interactions in musical pitch processing.