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.
A cost of musical training? Sensorimotor flexibility in musical sequence learning
