Isochrony, vocal learning, and the acquisition of rhythm and melody

A cross-species perspective can extend and provide testable predictions for Savage et al.'s framework. Rhythm and melody, I argue, could bootstrap each other in the evolution of musicality. Isochrony may function as a temporal grid to support rehearsing and learning modulated, pitched vocalizations. Once this melodic plasticity is acquired, focus can shift back to refining rhythm processing and beat induction.

Tapping to Carter: Mensural Determinacy in Complex Rhythmic Sequences

The tapping paradigm has played an important role in formulating beat induction models. However, experimental studies that make use of actual music as source materials to investigate pulse finding mechanisms in complex rhythmic sequences are lacking. The present study proposes to use the concept of mensural determinacy, that is, the emergence of temporal expectations that may or may not be realized (Hasty, 1997), to explore the relative salience of an implied beat in two contrasting rhythmic sequences extracted from Elliott Carter's 90+ for piano (1994), and test the influence of style-specific expertise on listeners' spontaneous tapping performance. The results of the experiment were consistent with the hypothesis that familiarity with the style represented by the source materials contributes to a more stable tapping period. In addition, although accent was found to have a main effect on tapping behavior, it also interacted with global temporal structure and a number of musical parameters and participant characteristics, including gender. Exploratory analyses of several additional musical parameters and participants' characteristics are also suggestive of how experimental methods could be complemented by post-hoc score analysis to investigate the contributions of specific factors to the relative influence of first- and second-order periodicity on musicians' beat percepts.

Pattern and Variation in the Timing of Aksak Meter: Commentary on Goldberg

In a chronometric timing study of percussive accompaniment in two recorded live performances from south-eastern Europe, Daniel Goldberg (2015) focuses on timing variations that relate to several levels of grouping structure and musical form. This commentary puts the target study into the context of performance timing research, confirms its empirical validity by a replication of core findings using a slightly different chronometric protocol, and finds a systematic variation of same-category durations within each bar, suggesting that a metric timing pattern (London 2012) might play a role. Finally, I argue that Goldberg’s analysis speaks of both variation <em>and</em> stability of performance timing patterns. While this statement is near banal, it cannot be easily explained, in the studied context of an asymmetric 3-beat/7-subdivisions aksak meter ( | x . . x . x . | ), by contemporary conceptualizations of the cognitive processes that constitute reference frameworks for musical rhythm performance and perception (e.g., metric projection, beat induction, or dynamic attending).