WHEN A MELODY BEGINS WITH AN ANACRUSIS, (i.e.,"pick up" notes), rhythm and meter are out of phase. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the interactions between structural (rhythm and pitch) and performance (articulation and tempo) factors on the perception of anacruses. The independent variables were rhythmic figure, initial melodic direction, initial melodic interval, implied harmony, articulation, and tempo. Participants tapped "every other beat" to melodies composed for each experiment; the phase-alignment of taps with the stimulus was the dependent measure of anacrustic vs. non-anacrustic perception. Experiment 1 found a strong main effect for rhythmic figure and an interaction between rhythmic figure and tempo. Experiment 2 showed that as tempo increased there was a systematic shift toward anacrustic perception of some melodies. Experiment 3 found that in a rhythmically impoverished context, pitch-based structural factors had only a weak effect on the perception of anacrusis.

It is argued that approaches to music that employ evolutionary theory must seek to define ‘music’ as explicitly as possible. Without such a definition, the relationships between music and other domains of human and animal behavior must remain underspecified, limiting the generality of any claims that can be made concerning its evolutionary roots.

A series of experiments investigated cognitive processes involved in listening to a piece of music, focusing in particular on the abstraction of surface features (here referred to as cues). Subjects listened to an unfamiliar piece in a familiar musical idiom, and their sensitivities to aspects of the just-heard piece were used to elucidate the nature of their representations of the piece in recent memory. The study also sought to assess the capacities of subjects to use any declarative knowledge of aspects of tonal structure that they possessed in organizing musical material. Three experiments made use of different procedures to address these issues, using either a single short tonal piece—Schubert's Valse sentimentale, D. 779, op. 50, no. 6—or a variant of this. The first two experiments used nonmusician subjects and examined (1) the cues abstracted in listening to the piece and (2) subjects' ability to identify the temporal location of segments of the piece after listening. The third experiment explored the constructional abilities of musician and nonmusician subjects, requiring them to create a coherent piece by ordering the segments that made up the original piece. The results of these experiments indicated that although the abilities of musicians differed from those of nonmusicians, both groups of subjects exhibited a weaker sensitivity to features of musical structure than to cues abstracted from the musical surface.

Several recent investigations of children's cognition of musical pitch have examined the nature of children's sensitivity to the "tonal hierarchy" identified by Krumhansl (1990a). These studies presented children with musical "contexts," asking them to make judgments about subsequent pitches, and have produced strikingly divergent results. Factors of age and of type of "musical material used in context" appear to play significant roles in determining subjects' sensitivities. This paper describes two experiments that examine the time course of the development of children's cognitive representations of pitch relations, taking into account the contributions made to such representations by structural and by temporal factors (following West & Fryer, 1990). A probetone technique was used with two contrasting context types, one being a "typical" cadential sequence and the other consisting of different randomizations of the diatonic collection. This experiment was conducted on 285 children ranging between 6 and 11 years old, from two different single-sex schools. The results were further investigated in a gameplaying experiment—using chime bars— with children from each age group represented in the first experiment. These experiments appear to indicate that children's early representations of pitch relations are remarkably stable and that development may take the form of an increasing sensitivity to time-dependent characteristics of the musical surface leading to an internalization of the tonal hierarchy. Despite the different methodologies used here, results are broadly in line with those suggested by Krumhansl and Keil ( 1982), although children's representations of musical pitch as exhibited here appear to be more sophisticated than would be implied in that study.