Syncopation and the score.

Chunyang Song,Marcus T Pearce,Christopher A Harte,Mark B Sandler,Andrew J R Simpson

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0074692

Abstract

The score is a symbolic encoding that describes a piece of music, written according to the conventions of music theory, which must be rendered as sound (e.g., by a performer) before it may be perceived as music by the listener. In this paper we provide a step towards unifying music theory with music perception in terms of the relationship between notated rhythm (i.e., the score) and perceived syncopation. In our experiments we evaluated this relationship by manipulating the score, rendering it as sound and eliciting subjective judgments of syncopation. We used a metronome to provide explicit cues to the prevailing rhythmic structure (as defined in the time signature). Three-bar scores with time signatures of 4/4 and 6/8 were constructed using repeated one-bar rhythm-patterns, with each pattern built from basic half-bar rhythm-components. Our manipulations gave rise to various rhythmic structures, including polyrhythms and rhythms with missing strong- and/or down-beats. Listeners (N = 10) were asked to rate the degree of syncopation they perceived in response to a rendering of each score. We observed higher degrees of syncopation in time signatures of 6/8, for polyrhythms, and for rhythms featuring a missing down-beat. We also found that the location of a rhythm-component within the bar has a significant effect on perceived syncopation. Our findings provide new insight into models of syncopation and point the way towards areas in which the models may be improved.

Highlights

Beat is the underlying periodic percept that human listeners extract from temporal patterns in music [1]
We test the hypothesis that the following will have a degree of influence on perceived syncopation: i) time signature, ii) whether the down-beat is present or missing, iii) presence of polyrhythms or ‘‘monorhythms’’ and iv) within-bar location of rhythm components
This gives a pair of ratings distributions which may be compared to see whether either time signature was more or less highly rated

Summary

Introduction

Beat is the underlying periodic percept that human listeners extract from temporal patterns in music [1]. When human listeners infer structure from salient periodicities in beat groupings, the resulting abstract temporal construct is known as meter [2,3,4]. We test the hypothesis that the following will have a degree of influence on perceived syncopation: i) time signature, ii) whether the down-beat is present or missing, iii) presence of polyrhythms or ‘‘monorhythms’’ (which we will define here as any rhythm pattern which is not polyrhythmic) and iv) within-bar location of rhythm components. We observed higher degrees of perceived syncopation for monorhythms in the time signature of 6/8 than for those in 4/4, for polyrhythms than monorhythms, and for rhythms featuring a missing down-beat and/or strong-beat. Our findings suggest that current models of syncopation [6,9,10,11,12,13,14,15] may have scope for improvement

Materials and Methods

Results

Conclusions and Discussion