scholarly journals Listeners lengthen phrase boundaries in self-paced music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haley Elisabeth Kragness ◽  
Laurel Trainor
Keyword(s):  
Dwell Time ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Time Difference ◽  
Action Perception ◽  
Phrase Boundary ◽  
Melodic Contour ◽  
Musical Production ◽  
Key Press ◽  
Musical Sequence

Previous work has shown that musicians tend to slow down as they approach phrase boundaries (phrase-final lengthening). In the present experiments, we used a paradigm from the action perception literature, the dwell time paradigm (Hard, Recchia, & Tversky, 2011), to investigate whether participants engage in phrase boundary lengthening when self-pacing through musical sequences. When participants used a key press to produce each successive chord of Bach chorales, they dwelled longer on boundary chords than non-boundary chords in both the original chorales and atonal manipulations of the chorales. When a novel musical sequence was composed that controlled for metrical and melodic contour cues to boundaries, the dwell time difference between boundaries and non-boundaries was greater in the tonal condition than in the atonal condition. Furthermore, similar results were found for a group of non-musicians, suggesting that phrase-final lengthening in musical production is not dependent on musical training and can be evoked by harmonic cues.

scholarly journals Young children pause on phrase boundaries in self-paced music listening: The role of harmonic cues

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haley Elisabeth Kragness ◽  
Laurel Trainor
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Dwell Time ◽  
Music Listening ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Phrase Boundary ◽  
Melodic Contour ◽  
Child Friendly ◽  
Musical Understanding ◽  
Contour Grouping

Proper segmentation of auditory streams is essential for understanding music. Many cues, including meter, melodic contour, and harmony, influence adults’ perception of musical phrase boundaries. To date, no studies have examined young children’s musical grouping in a production task. We used a musical self-pacing method to investigate (1) whether dwell times index young children’s musical phrase grouping and, if so, (2) whether children dwell longer on phrase boundaries defined by harmonic cues specifically. In Experiment 1, we asked 3-year-old children to self-pace through chord progressions from Bach chorales (sequences in which metrical, harmonic, and melodic contour grouping cues aligned) by pressing a computer key to present each chord in the sequence. Participants dwelled longer on chords in the eighth position, which corresponded to phrase endings. In Experiment 2, we tested 3-, 4-, and 7-year-old children’s sensitivity to harmonic cues to phrase grouping when metrical regularity cues and melodic contour cues were misaligned with the harmonic phrase boundaries. In this case, 7- and 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds dwelled longer on harmonic phrase boundaries, suggesting that the influence of harmonic cues on phrase boundary perception develops substantially between 3 and 4 years of age in Western children. Overall, we show that the musical dwell time method is child-friendly and can be used to investigate various aspects of young children’s musical understanding, including phrase grouping and harmonic knowledge.

An Exploration of Children's Musical Compositions

1995 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Wilson ◽  
Roger J. Wales
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Developmental Stages ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Music Training ◽  
Post Hoc Analysis ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
Melodic Contour ◽  
Training Post ◽  
Post Hoc

In this study, we examined the musical compositions of children aged 7 and 9 years to discover the nature of childrens melodic and rhythmic representations of music. The compositions were performed using a computer program that did not require formal music training. Post hoc analysis revealed that the compositions could be divided into three melodic and rhythmic developmental stages that varied according to melodic contour, tonality, rhythmic grouping, and meter. Older children created more compositions at higher stages of complexity, and the more private musical training children had received, the more rhythmically complex their compositions were. The girls produced a greater percentage of compositions assigned to the highest stages than did the boys. Qualitative features of the subjects' approach to the task were noted during testing and were also found to vary with developmental stage. The number of parts inherent in the compositions was a nonpredictive variable in this analysis.

scholarly journals Auditory local–global temporal processing: evidence for perceptual reorganization with musical expertise

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Susini ◽  
Sarah Jibodh Jiaouan ◽  
Elena Brunet ◽  
Olivier Houix ◽  
Emmanuel Ponsot
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Information ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Local Processing ◽  
Processing Scheme ◽  
Melodic Contour ◽  
Analytic Processing ◽  
Local Interference

Abstract The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Recent studies addressing how the auditory system deals with local–global temporal information suggest a comparable processing scheme, but little is known about how this organization is modulated by long-term musical training, in particular regarding musical sequences. Here, we investigate how non-musicians and expert musicians detect local and global pitch changes in short hierarchical tone sequences structured across temporally-segregated triplets made of musical intervals (local scale) forming a melodic contour (global scale) varying either in one direction (monotonic) or both (non-monotonic). Our data reveal a clearly distinct organization between both groups. Non-musicians show global advantage (enhanced performance to detect global over local modifications) and global-to-local interference effects (interference of global over local processing) only for monotonic sequences, while musicians exhibit the reversed pattern for non-monotonic sequences. These results suggest that the local–global processing scheme depends on the complexity of the melodic contour, and that long-term musical training induces a prominent perceptual reorganization that reshapes its initial global dominance to favour local information processing. This latter result supports the theory of “analytic” processing acquisition in musicians.

scholarly journals MP08-12 EVALUATION OF THE DWELL-TIME DIFFERENCE IN INTRAVESICAL BACILLUS CALMETTE-GUÉRIN THERAPY

2018 ◽  
Vol 199 (4S) ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Nagai ◽  
Takehiko Okamura ◽  
Ryosuke Chaya ◽  
Daichi Kobayashi ◽  
Takahiro Kobayashi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dwell Time ◽  
Time Difference ◽  
Bacillus Calmette Guerin

Children's Perception of Musical Patterns: Effects of Music Instruction

1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara A. Morrongiello ◽  
Caroline L. Roes ◽  
Faith Donnelly
Keyword(s):  
Task Difficulty ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
Discrimination Performance ◽  
Music Instruction ◽  
Enhanced Sensitivity ◽  
Melodic Contour ◽  
Transformation Type ◽  
Musical Patterns ◽  
Better Than

Musically trained and untrained children between 4 and 6 years of age were tested for their discrimination of transformations of an unfamiliar six-tone melody. Transformations involved a change in one, two, or all three of the following features: melodic contour, musical intervals, or individual frequencies. In order to manipulate task difficulty, melodies were played at different presentation rates. Results revealed that discrimination performance varied as a function of (1) musical training, (2) what features of a melody were changed, (3) number of features of a melody that changed, and (4) rate of presentation. Musically trained children performed better than children without training, they showed enhanced sensitivity to the more specific melodic features (i. e., individual frequencies), they were better at detecting transformations involving changes in a fewer number of features, and their performance was unaffected by rate of presentation. In contrast, children without training attended primarily to more general pattern features (i. e., melodic contour) and needed a change involving a larger number of musical features for reliable discrimination of a transformation. In general, as the rate of presentation of the melody increased a decrement in performance occurred for untrained listeners, but the magnitude of these effects varied with transformation type.

scholarly journals Auditory local-global temporal processing: Evidence for perceptual reorganization with musical expertise

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Susini ◽  
Sarah Jibodh Jiaouan ◽  
Elena Brunet ◽  
Olivier Houix ◽  
Emmanuel Ponsot
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Information ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Local Processing ◽  
Processing Scheme ◽  
Melodic Contour ◽  
Analytic Processing ◽  
Local Interference

The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Recent studies addressing how the auditory system deals with local-global temporal information suggest a comparable processing scheme, but little is known about how this organization is modulated by long-term musical training, in particular regarding musical sequences. Here, we investigate how non-musicians and expert musicians detect local and global pitch changes in short hierarchical tone sequences structured across temporally-segregated triplets made of musical intervals (local scale) forming a melodic contour (global scale) varying either in one direction (monotonic) or both (non-monotonic). Our data reveal a clearly distinct organization between both groups. Non-musicians show global advantage (enhanced performance to detect global over local modifications) and global-to-local interference effects (interference of global over local processing) only for monotonic sequences, while musicians exhibit the reversed pattern for non-monotonic sequences. These results suggest that the local-global processing scheme depends on the complexity of the melodic contour, and that long-term musical training induces a prominent perceptual reorganization that reshapes its initial global dominance to favour local information processing. This latter result supports the theory of “analytic” processing acquisition in musicians.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document