Absolute Tempo Research Articles

Absolute tempo perception of popular music.

Several studies have demonstrated that the capacity to remember absolute tempo (AT) is fairly common (Brennan & Stevens, 2006; Dowling, Bartlett, Halpern, & Andrews, 2008; Halpern, 1988; Krumhansl, 2000; Levitin & Cook, 1996; Madison & Paulin, 2010). Briefly, AT refers to memory for the speed (e.g., beats per minute [BPM]) characterizing the performance of piece of music-the temporal equivalent to absolute pitch perception (Tan, Pfordresher, & Harre, 2010). The current research was designed to assess a listener's capacity for AT in a perceptual task with mass-marketed, popular1 music manipulated at faster and slower playback rates. The use of popular music was selected to assess AT as a general capacity in the population. On the basis of casual experience with popular music, listeners of various levels of musical sophistication may be able to make perceptual judgments. Hence, in the current research, listeners were asked to judge popular music excerpts that were faster and slower in tempo relative to the original recordings. Past findings on AT (Drake & Botte, 1993; Krumhansl, 2000; Levitin & Cook, 1996; Miller & McAuley, 2005; Quinn & Watt, 2006; Rashotte & Wedell, 2014) motivate hypotheses for the current tests of AT perception in mass-marketed popular music.Memory for mass-marketed, popular music has been tested by asking participants to sing musical selections that they knew and enjoyed (Levitin & Cook, 1996). The participants, even those with little or no music training, tended to be fairly accurate in attempts to sing the music at the original tempi; typically, ±8% of the original beat. The accuracy of temporal productions in music varied somewhat by the musical genres and their associated rhythmic rigor (Levitin & Cook, 1996). Mass-marketed music may be particularly amenable to AT production because listeners are often only exposed to a single recording of a piece of music. While traditional songs like Happy Birthday or Mary Had a Little Lamb are interpreted and regularly altered, pop music recordings like Beyonce's Single Ladies or the Beatles' Hey Jude are likely to be repeatedly experienced by a listener with one accepted original, standard version. Consequently, a listener is likely to have multiple exposures to the same recording and across varying contexts. That repetition of exposures across variable contexts could serve to develop an accurate and well-encoded memory representation. For this reason one might expect that pop music could potentially reveal a highly favorable paradigm for testing AT. However, the reported ±8% accuracy in this production task is less precise than found in AT perceptual studies that used novel musical stimuli (Drake & Botte, 1993; Miller & McAuley, 2005; Quinn & Watt, 2006).One recent set of studies investigated the capacity for AT with highly popular music to evaluate the stability of the memory trace across temporal contexts (Rashotte & Wedell, 2014). Participants were presented highly familiar and unfamiliar musical samples from mass-marketed, popular artists (e.g., Lady Gaga, Eminem). After refamiliarization with the originals, tempo-altered versions of the musical samples were presented to participants. The participants evaluated the magnitude and direction (i.e., speeding vs. slowing) of the tempo modifications relative to their memory of the original. A temporal context was manipulated by clustering sets of the altered tempos that were much more rapid (or much slower) than the originals in the test blocks. Both familiar and unfamiliar popular music samples were subject to influence by the temporal context of testing. However, the influence tended to be greater with unfamiliar music, and was reduced when the memory trace was more stable with the familiar music. These findings suggest both the capacity to maintain a memory for AT and the plasticity of this memory with new exposures to similar stimuli. …

Testing the absolute-tempo hypothesis: context effects for familiar and unfamiliar songs.

In two experiments, we investigated context effects on tempo judgments for familiar and unfamiliar songs performed by popular artists. In Experiment 1, participants made comparative tempo judgments to a remembered standard for song clips drawn from either a slow or a fast context, created by manipulating the tempos of the same songs. Although both familiar and unfamiliar songs showed significant shifts in their points of subjective equality toward the tempo context values, more-familiar songs showed significantly reduced contextual bias. In Experiment 2, tempo pleasantness ratings showed significant context effects in which the ordering of tempos on the pleasantness scale differed across contexts, with the most pleasant tempo shifting toward the contextual values, an assimilation of ideal points. Once again, these effects were significant but reduced for the more-familiar songs. The moderating effects of song familiarity support a weak version of the absolute-tempo hypothesis, in which long-term memory for tempo reduces but does not eliminate contextual effects. Thus, although both relative and absolute tempo information appear to be encoded in memory, the absolute representation may be subject to rapid revision by recently experienced tempo-altered versions of the same song.

Absolute Tempo in Multiple Performances of Aboriginal Songs: Analyzing Recordings of Djanba 12 and Djanba 14

songs that are not notated but transmitted through live performance are of particular interest for the psychological study of the stability of tempo across multiple performances. While experimental research points to highly accurate memory for the tempi of well-known recorded music, this study asks whether there is any evidence of absolute tempo in a performance tradition that does not draw on such reference recordings. Fifty-four field recordings of performances of one Aboriginal dance-song, Djanba 14, were analyzed. Results showed that over a span of 34 years, performance tempi deviated positively or negatively, on average, by 2%. Such small tempo variation is similar to JND thresholds to discriminate the tempi of isochronous sequences. Thirty-five field recordings of another song from the same repertory, Djanba 12, deviated in tempi by an average of 3%. We discuss the musical, psychological, physical, and cultural factors likely to shape such temporal stability.

Setting the absolute tempo of biodiversity dynamics

Neutral biodiversity theory has the potential to contribute to our understanding of how macroevolutionary dynamics influence contemporary biodiversity, but there are issues regarding its dynamical predictions that must first be resolved. Here we address these issues by extending the theory in two ways using a novel analytical approach: (1) we set the absolute tempo of biodiversity dynamics by explicitly incorporating population-level stochasticity in abundance; (2) we allow new species to arise with more than one individual. Setting the absolute tempo yields quantitative predictions on biodiversity dynamics that can be tested using contemporary and fossil data. Allowing incipient-species abundances greater than one individual yields predictions on how these dynamics, and the form of the species-abundance distribution, are affected by multiple speciation modes. We apply this new model to contemporary and fossil data that encompass 30 Myr of macroevolution for planktonic foraminifera. By synthesizing the model with these empirical data, we present evidence that dynamical issues with neutral biodiversity theory may be resolved by incorporating the effects of environmental stochasticity and incipient-species abundance on biodiversity dynamics.

It's not what you say but the way you say it: Matching faces and voices.

Recent studies have shown that the face and voice of an unfamiliar person can be matched for identity. Here the authors compare the relative effects of changing sentence content (what is said) and sentence manner (how it is said) on matching identity between faces and voices. A change between speaking a sentence as a statement and as a question disrupted matching performance, whereas changing the sentence itself did not. This was the case when the faces and voices were from the same race as participants and speaking a familiar language (English; Experiment 1) or from another race and speaking an unfamiliar language (Japanese; Experiment 2). Altering manner between conversational and clear speech (Experiment 3) or between conversational and casual speech (Experiment 4) was also disruptive. However, artificially slowing (Experiment 5) or speeding (Experiment 6) speech did not affect cross-modal matching performance. The results show that bimodal cues to identity are closely linked to manner but that content (what is said) and absolute tempo are not critical. Instead, prosodic variations in rhythmic structure and/or expressiveness may provide a bimodal, dynamic identity signature.

Predicting the similarity between expressive performances of music from measurements of tempo and dynamics

Measurements of tempo and dynamics from audio files or MIDI data are frequently used to get insight into a performer's contribution to music. The measured variations in tempo and dynamics are often represented in different formats by different authors. Few systematic comparisons have been made between these representations. Moreover, it is unknown what data representation comes closest to subjective perception. The reported study tests the perceptual validity of existing data representations by comparing their ability to explain the subjective similarity between pairs of performances. In two experiments, 40 participants rated the similarity between performances of a Chopin prelude and a Mozart sonata. Models based on different representations of the tempo and dynamics of the performances were fitted to these similarity ratings. The results favor other data representations of performances than generally used, and imply that comparisons between performances are made perceptually in a different way than often assumed. For example, the best fit was obtained with models based on absolute tempo and absolute tempo times loudness, while conventional models based on normalized variations, or on correlations between tempo profiles and loudness profiles, did not explain the similarity ratings well.

Absolute pitch and tempo in mothers' songs to infants.

We examined the relative stability of pitch, tempo, and rhythm in maternal speech and singing to prelinguistic infants. Mothers were recorded speaking and singing to their infants on two occasions separated by 1 week or more. The pitch level and tempo of identical utterances were highly variable across the 1-week period, but these features were virtually unchanged in song repetitions. Rhythmic patterning was largely maintained in speech, as in song. Mothers' accurate reproduction of their sung performances can be considered a form of absolute pitch and absolute tempo.

A re-examination of the evidence on absolute tempo before 1700 - II

A re-examination of the evidence on absolute tempo before 1700 - II

A re-examination of the evidence on absolute tempo before 1700 — II

A re-examination of the evidence on absolute tempo before 1700 — II

A re-examination of the evidence on absolute tempo before 1700 — I

Journal Article A re-examination of the evidence on absolute tempo before 1700 — I Get access Ephraim Segerman Ephraim Segerman Ephraim Segerman is a historian, technologist and maker of pre-modern musical strings. He edits and contributes to FoMRHI[Fellowship of Makers and Researchers of Historical Instruments] Quarterly. His training as a physicist has led him to make judgement subservient to evidence whenever they conflict. His results are thus sometimes contrary to popular assumptions of the early music movement. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Early Music, Volume XXIV, Issue 2, May 1996, Pages 227–249, https://doi.org/10.1093/earlyj/XXIV.2.227 Published: 01 May 1996

A re-examination of the evidence on absolute tempo before 1700 - I

A re-examination of the evidence on absolute tempo before 1700 - I

Memory for musical tempo: Additional evidence that auditory memory is absolute

We report evidence that long-term memory retains absolute (accurate) features of perceptual events. Specifically, we show that memory for music seems to preserve the absolute tempo of the musical performance. In Experiment 1, 46 subjects sang two different popular songs from memory, and their tempos were compared with recorded versions of the songs. Seventy-two percent of the productions on two consecutive trials came within 8% of the actual tempo, demonstrating accuracy near the perceptual threshold (JND) for tempo. In Experiment 2, a control experiment, we found that folk songs lacking a tempo standard generally have a large variability in tempo; this counters arguments that memory for the tempo of remembered songs is driven by articulatory constraints. The relevance of the present findings to theories of perceptual memory and memory for music is discussed.

Perceiving Musical Time

Three experiments are described that investigate listeners' perceptions of the segmentation of a piece of atonal piano music, the location of segments extracted from the piece, and the duration and structural qualities of each segment. The experiments showed that listeners segmented the music in broad agreement with the grouping principles proposed by Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) and perceived the location of randomly presented segments of the music in a strongly veridical manner. Listeners' location judgments did, however, show systematic departures from veridicality, segments towards the beginning and end of the piece appearing to be located closer to the center of the piece than was actually the case. Judgments of the duration of extracted segments also were strongly veridical and were unaffected by concurrent ratings of structural properties of the segments. In order to assess possible effects of the unfamiliar musical style, the same three experiments were carried out on a piece of tonal piano music of comparable length, yielding essentially identical results. It is argued that the pattern of departures from veridicality in the location judgments for both pieces may indicate systematic changes in attention in the course of listening to the music, linked to large-scale properties of musical structure that are found in music from a variety of styles and periods. The independence of the segmental duration judgments from structural properties of the music may be a consequence of the performance skills of the musically trained listeners used in this study (a sense of absolute tempo is one of the abilities that a performer must acquire) and/or the particular methods used in the experiments.

Syncopated auditory polyrhythms: Discontinuous reversals in meter interpretation

Subjects tapped the beat (i.e., meter) of a polyrhythm in which one tone occurred three times per pattern repitition while the second tone occurred four times per pattern repitition. At one presentation rate, the polyrhythm underwent a figure-ground reversal —the beat shifted from one tone to the other. Rhythmic organization is thus a function of the absolute tempo.