The whole song is greater than the sum of its parts: Local and structural features in music listening.

Abstract

Four experiments reported here demonstrate the importance of structural as well as local features in listening to contemporary popular music. Experiment 1 established that listeners without formal musical training regard as salient the formal structure that links individual sections of songs. When asked to listen to and assemble the individual sections of unfamiliar contemporary songs to form new compositions, participants positioned the sections in ways consistent with the true structure of the music. In Experiment 2, participants were provided with only the song lyrics with which to arrange the individual sections of contemporary songs. It was found that in addition to musical features studied in Experiment 1, lyrical content of contemporary music also acts as a strong cue to a song's formal structure. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that listeners' enjoyment of music is influenced both by structural features and local features of music, which were carried by the individual song sections. The influence of structural features on music listening was most apparent over repeated hearings. In Experiment 4, listeners' liking for contemporary music followed an inverted U-shape trend with repeated exposure, in which liking for music took a downward turn after just four repeated hearings. In contrast, liking for restructured music increased with repeated hearings and almost eliminated an initial negative effect of restructuring by the sixth hearing. In sum, our findings demonstrate that structural features as well as local features of contemporary music are salient and important to listeners.Keywords: music listening, local and structural features, song form, song structure, contemporary and popular musicMusic composition is a creative process through which the songwriter engages the listener. Central to this process is how themes, motifs, and individual elements of a composition are linked and arranged, and this process is a major determinant of a composition's overall form and structure (Bonds, 1991; Car- penter, 1983). The issue of formal structure and its variations in music composition is a topic of great discussion among song- writers and musicologists (Cohn & Dempster, 1992; Covach, 2005; Nadeau & Tesson, 1968). However, despite its impor- tance for music composition, it is less clear whether structural features of song form are important for the experiences of the listener. For example, when researchers have rearranged the individual sections of classical compositions to form new re- structured versions of those compositions, it is often found that this has little (to no) influence on the experiences of the listener (Eitan & Granot, 2008; Gotlieb & Konecni, 1985; Karno & Konecni, 1992; Konecni, 1984; Tillmann & Bigand, 1996). In some cases, listeners have actually preferred the restructured versions, even when these severely violate the composer's intended structure (Eitan & Granot, 2008).Tan et al. (Tan & Spackman, 2005; Tan, Spackman, & Peaslee, 2006) found that restructuring classical compositions impacts on the listener, but only when musical segments are combined from completely different compositions. As well as rating the patchwork versions as less unified, participants rated the compositions as less pleasing initially than their original intact versions. Structural features of music may be important for the experiences of the listener then, but effects of restructuring may only become apparent for compositions that have a salient structure or when adjacent sections differ sharply in volume and tone, such as when segments are combined from different compositions and are heard as part of a complete composition.When chunks or individual segments of compositions are reas- sembled to form restructured versions, this preserves local features of the music but disrupts the formal structure of the composition. Restructuring may even focus the listener's attention on local aspects of music by disrupting its overall form. …