The processing of temporal and nontemporal information in the remembering of event durations and musical structure

Abstract

Within the field of cognitive psychology, one issue of theoretical debate concerns the relationship between an event's temporal (e.g., rhythm, rate, total duration) and nontemporal (e.g., sequence of pitch intervals) information. Some argue these are jointly encoded into the cognitive system, whereas others claim they are encoded in an independent fashion. This issue was investigated in 2 experiments that systematically manipulated participants' attention to the temporal and pitch properties of melodies and then examined participants' subsequent remembering of these structural dimensions. The results indicate that the nature of encoding is strongly dependent on the structure of environmental events and the degree of learning experience. This relationship in turn has implications for theories of both music cognition and time estimation behavior.