Abstract
Phrasing facilitates the organization of auditory information and is central to speech and music. Not surprisingly, aspects of changing intensity, rhythm, and pitch are key determinants of musical phrases and their boundaries in instrumental note-based music. Different kinds of speech (such as tone- vs. stress-languages) share these features in different proportions and form an instructive comparison. However, little is known about whether or how musical phrasing is perceived in sound-based music, where the basic musical unit from which a piece is created is commonly non-instrumental continuous sounds, rather than instrumental discontinuous notes. This issue forms the target of the present paper. Twenty participants (17 untrained in music) were presented with six stimuli derived from sound-based music, note-based music, and environmental sound. Their task was to indicate each occurrence of a perceived phrase and qualitatively describe key characteristics of the stimulus associated with each phrase response. It was hypothesized that sound-based music does elicit phrase perception, and that this is primarily associated with temporal changes in intensity and timbre, rather than rhythm and pitch. Results supported this hypothesis. Qualitative analysis of participant descriptions showed that for sound-based music, the majority of perceived phrases were associated with intensity or timbral change. For the note-based piano piece, rhythm was the main theme associated with perceived musical phrasing. We modeled the occurrence in time of perceived musical phrases with recurrent event ‘hazard’ analyses using time-series data representing acoustic predictors associated with intensity, spectral flatness, and rhythmic density. Acoustic intensity and timbre (represented here by spectral flatness) were strong predictors of perceived musical phrasing in sound-based music, and rhythm was only predictive for the piano piece. A further analysis including five additional spectral measures linked to timbre strengthened the models. Overall, results show that even when little of the pitch and rhythm information important for phrasing in note-based music is available, phrasing is still perceived, primarily in response to changes of intensity and timbre. Implications for electroacoustic music composition and music recommender systems are discussed.
Highlights
Phrasing is important for structuring auditory streams and facilitates the organization of auditory information [1, 2]
In the presence of limited pitch and rhythmic information, we propose that additional acoustic attributes such as changes in timbre may join with changes of intensity to explain listeners’ perception of phrases in sound-based music
We suggest that a similar mechanism applies here: listeners unfamiliar with sound-based music will not necessarily immediately understand or extract the genre-specific conventions of such music, they will use available acoustic cues common to most genres to perceive and segment the unfamiliar music; timbre and intensity
Summary
Phrasing is important for structuring auditory streams and facilitates the organization of auditory information [1, 2]. A phrase usually comprises a few words that taken together in larger clauses can constitute meaning, most commonly in the form of a sentence. To determine boundaries between segments of any kind in speech (notably between words, clauses, and sentences), infant and adult listeners use acoustic cues such as changes in intensity/amplitude, rhythmic (durational) pattern, and pitch contour [3,4,5]. In note-based instrumental or vocal music, pitch-related aspects of the music are primary determinants of how listeners perceive and segment a musical phrase; for example, contrasts of pitch range and changes in melodic contour and tonal stress [1, 6,7,8,9]. The binding of instrumental pitched (and unpitched percussive) notes to rhythmic structure is important in note-based music. Given a clear note energy envelope of attack, sustain, and decay, individual notes are separable and delineate rhythms associated with musical phrases
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