The generation of temporal and melodic expectancies during musical listening

Abstract

When listening to a melody, we are often able to anticipate not only what tonal intervals will occur next but also when in time these will appear. The experiments reported here were carried out to investigate what types of structural relations support the generation of temporal expectancies in the context of a melody recognition task. The strategy was to present subjects with a set of folk tunes in which temporal accents (i.e., notes with a prolonged duration) always occurred in the first half of a melody, so that expectancies, if generated, could carry over to an isochronous sequence of notes in the latter half of the melody. The ability to detect deviant pitch changes in the final variation as a function of rhythmic context was then evaluated. Accuracy and reaction time data from Experiment 1 indicated that expectancy formation jointly depends on an invariant periodicity of temporal accentuation and the attentional highlighting of certain melodic relations (i.e., phrase ending points). In Experiment 2, once these joint expectancies were generated, the temporal dimension had a greater facilitating effect upon melody recognition than did the melodic one. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the perceptual processing of musical events.