Effect of loudness and timing variation on rhythm perception

Abstract

A rhythmically ambiguous musical passage, interpretable as being in either duple or triple time, was constructed. The loudness and timing of notes in the passage were varied in order to systematically explore the space of expressive variation of these parameters that would be used by a performer to induce a particular rhythmic interpretation. The resulting stimuli were played to musically trained experimental subjects, who were then asked to make a forced choice between duple and triple rhythmic interpretations. The subjects' responses were statistically analyzed and compared with a hypothetical model of their interpretive processes. It was found that, while loudness variation affected subjects' responses in a manner consistent with previous results and with the hypothetical model, timing variation, surprisingly, has no obvious effect on the subjects' responses. These results have implications for machine interpretation of rhythm, as well as for an understanding of human rhythm processing.