Mental representations for musical meter.

Abstract

Investigations of the psychological representation for musical meter provided evidence for an internalized hierarchy from 3 sources: frequency distributions in musical compositions, goodnessof-fit judgments of temporal patterns in metrical contexts, and memory confusions in discrimination judgments.The frequency with which musical events occurred in different temporal locations differentiates one meter from another and coincides with music-theoretic predictions of accent placement.Goodness-of-fit judgments for events presented in metrical contexts indicated a multileveled hierarchy of relative accent strength, with finer differentiation among hierarchical levels by musically experienced than inexperienced listeners.Memory confusions of temporal patterns in a discrimination task were characterized by the same hierarchy of inferred accent strength.These findings suggest mental representations for structural regularities underlying musical meter that influence perceiving, remembering, and composing music.Perception of music, speech, and other complex human behaviors requires the processing of structured information over time.Psychological theories of serially ordered behaviors often reveal hierarchical principles of mental processing and organization that express relations among nonadjacent as well as adjacent events.Mental representations for these behaviors suggest that the complex information is recoded or organized in a form more efficient for abstract operations.A primary assumption is that the observed behavior involves complex mental processes that transform early sensory information, compare it to detailed memories, and apply decision rules to the transformed internal codes.This theoretical framework suggests that music perception involves the recoding and organizing of musical material through reference to a more abstract system of knowledge about musical structure.This abstract knowledge often represents the underlying regularities found in one's own musical culture, such as a particular tonal system or common metrical properties.These mental structures may facilitate comprehension of global aspects of musical structure and lead to expectations about future events.Thus, tonality can provide a (pitch-based) framework for melodic expectations, and meter may provide a (time-based) framework from which temporal expectations are formed.The research described later focuses on the nature of mental representation of one important aspect of musical structure: meter.We present evidence indicating that abstract knowledge of meter affects comprehension, memory, and composition of Western tonal music.