Repetition and novelty are essential components of tonal music. Previous research suggests that the degree of repetitiveness of a line can determine its relative melodicity within a musical texture. Concordantly, musical accompaniments tend to be highly repetitive, probably facilitating listeners’ tendency to focus on and follow the melodic lines they support. With the aim of contributing to the unexplored area of the relationship between repetition and attention in polyphonic music listening, this paper presents an empirical investigation of the way listeners attend to exact and immediate reiterations of musical fragments in two-part contrapuntal textures. Participants heard original excerpts composed of a repetitive and a nonrepetitive part, continuously rating the relative prominence of the two voices. The results indicate that the line that consists of immediate and exact repetitions of a short musical fragment tends to perceptually decrease in salience for the listener. This suggests that musical repetition plays a significant role in dynamically shaping listeners’ perceptions of musical texture by affecting the relative perceived importance of simultaneous parts.
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February 2016
Research Article|
February 01 2016
Effects of Repetition on Attention in Two-Part Counterpoint
Cecilia Taher
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Cecilia Taher, Schulich School of Music, McGill University, 555 Sherbrooke Street West, H3A1E3, Montréal, Québec, Canada. E-mail: cecilia.taher@mail.mcgill.ca
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Stephen McAdams
Stephen McAdams
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
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Cecilia Taher, Schulich School of Music, McGill University, 555 Sherbrooke Street West, H3A1E3, Montréal, Québec, Canada. E-mail: cecilia.taher@mail.mcgill.ca
Music Perception (2016) 33 (3): 306–318.
Article history
Received:
July 07 2014
Accepted:
April 23 2015
Citation
Cecilia Taher, René Rusch, Stephen McAdams; Effects of Repetition on Attention in Two-Part Counterpoint. Music Perception 1 February 2016; 33 (3): 306–318. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2016.33.3.306
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