In particular, no study has demonstrated that metrical strength relations exist between intermediate levels in the grid. None of these studies, however, conclusively show that listeners infer hierarchical metrical structures of the type shown in Fig 1.

Ī number of empirical studies show that listeners distinguish at least two levels of metrical prominence.

Non-auditory properties such as synchronized movement can also contribute to the perception of accent. A listener’s facility at inferring specific metrical structures from specific accent patterns is influenced by their culture-dependent history of exposure to those patterns. Accordingly, listeners find it easier to memorize and replicate sequences of sounds where accents correspond to strong metrical positions. The strong beats correspond to prominent temporal positions which are often associated with musical events having greater duration, intensity or harmonic information (which we will refer to collectively as accent). Common time in grid notation (showing two cycles). More generally, a beat is stronger than any other beat associated with positions at fewer levels of the grid.įig 1.

Common time is thus based on a pattern of four beats, in which the first one is the strongest beat, the second and fourth are the weakest, and the third is intermediate. In this metrical pattern, every second beat is stronger than the ones preceding and following it, and every second one of those strong beats is stronger than the strong beats that precede and follow it. For example, Fig 1 shows the grid notation of a very frequent metrical pattern, known as common time or. Each beat on the horizontal axis is associated with some level of abstract prominence, indicated by the number of dots on the vertical axis. Research was conducted at Institut d’Etudes Cognitives (ENS), which is supported by grants ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL* and ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īccording to music theory, isochronous (or near-isochronous) musical pieces possess a metrical structure which can be described by a grid indicating the relative prominence associated with various equally-spaced points in time, or beats. 324115–FRONTSEM (PI: Schlenker) and was also supported by a Euryi grant from the European Science Foundation (‘Presupposition: A Formal Pragmatic Approach’). įunding: The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007- 2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedĭata Availability: All data files are available from the Figshare repository. Received: JAccepted: OctoPublished: November 23, 2015Ĭopyright: © 2015 Katz et al. Citation: Katz J, Chemla E, Pallier C (2015) An Attentional Effect of Musical Metrical Structure.

Musical contexts form and structure