The importance of harmony perception in understanding tonal melodies has been extensively studied, but underlying processes of implied harmonic perception remain unexplored. This study explores how listeners perceive implied harmony in real-time while hearing tonal melodies by addressing two questions: How is each tone of a tonal melody harmonically interpreted and integrated into the previous tones? How do harmonic expectations of “what” chord will follow and “when” the chord change will occur affect the processing? Participants with music training listened to tonal melodies and responded to target tones by singing their pitches as quickly as possible. The target tones implied an expected or an unexpected chord; they occurred at expected or unexpected times. The results showed that sing-back reaction times (RTs) were shorter for: 1) tones implying an expected chord; and 2) chord changes occurring at expected times, suggesting that harmonic expectations facilitate the processing of tonal melodies. Also, RTs became shorter over the presentation of successive target tones implying the same chord, suggesting that implied harmony becomes clearer as more tones belonging to a single chord are presented.

Acoustic periodicity is an important factor for discriminating consonant and dissonant intervals. While previous studies have found that the periodicity of musical intervals is temporally encoded by neural phase locking throughout the auditory system, how the nonlinearities of the auditory pathway influence the encoding of periodicity and how this effect is related to sensory consonance has been underexplored. By measuring human auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) to four diotically presented musical intervals with increasing degrees of dissonance, this study seeks to explicate how the subcortical auditory system transforms the neural representation of acoustic periodicity for consonant versus dissonant intervals. ABRs faithfully reflect neural activity in the brainstem synchronized to the stimulus while also capturing nonlinear aspects of auditory processing. Results show that for the most dissonant interval, which has a less periodic stimulus waveform than the most consonant interval, the aperiodicity of the stimulus is intensified in the subcortical response. The decreased periodicity of dissonant intervals is related to a larger number of nonlinearities (i.e., distortion products) in the response spectrum. Our findings suggest that the auditory system transforms the periodicity of dissonant intervals resulting in consonant and dissonant intervals becoming more distinct in the neural code than if they were to be processed by a linear auditory system.

ORNAMENTATION IS ONE ASPECT OF MUSIC ASSOCIATED with emotional affect in Baroque music. In an empirical study, the relationship between ornamentation and emotion was investigated by asking a violinist and flutist to ornament three melodies in different ways to express four emotions: happiness, sadness, love, and anger. The performers adapted the type of ornaments to the instructed emotion as well as the characteristics of the ornaments. The flutist specifically varied the duration, timing, and complexity of the ornamentation, while the violinist varied the complexity, density, and sound level of the performances. The ability of the performers to communicate the emotions was tested in a listening experiment. Communication was found to be generally successful, with the exception of the communication of happiness. This success was not due to general consensus about the expression of emotions through ornamentation. Rather the listeners were sensitive to a performer's specific use of ornamentation.

Musicians have to make many interpretive decisions when performing a piece. For example, the grace note, a one-note musical ornament, has no precise duration written in the score; it has to steal its duration from either the preceding or following melody notes. This study addressed several empirical questions: What duration are grace notes given? Does this vary depending upon musical context or individual preferences? And, are the durations of grace notes taken from the preceding or subsequent melody note, or is time added? In an experiment, 16 professional pianists performed three musical fragments (from a Beethoven theme) "with" and "without" grace notes in seven different tempi. The timing of the grace notes was found not to be proportional to changes in global tempo for most, but not all performers, which replicates findings in earlier studies. In the majority of cases, increases in bar duration were matched by relative increases in grace-note duration that were smaller than predicted by a proportional tempo model, with a minority of subjects performing grace notes with fixed duration over tempo. In most cases, grace-note duration was "stolen" from the preceding melody note, with a small contribution from the following (main) note and with minimal disturbance to local tempo. Conversely, where grace notes were played as appoggiatura , the main source of their duration was the main note. The type of grace note performed depended both on its musical context and on individual differences between performers. A model of grace-note duration is proposed to account for these results.

This article examines a number of different performances of jazz ballad melodies in order to investigate the nature of expressive timing used by jazz soloists. Three performances of My Funny Valentine and two performances of Naima , taken from commercial recordings by master soloists, are examined. Expressive timing is seen to be a kind of tempo rubato involving a flexibility of melodic rhythm over a steady underlying beat. A typical strategy used is to begin the melody "late" relative to the accompaniment, and speed up over the course of a phrase. This delay-accelerate strategy is modulated in a number of ways. First, the nominal rhythms of motives are modified so as to preserve their categorical identity; below the level of the motive there is more expressive freedom. Second, there is a strong tendency for melodies to align with the accompaniment at cadential locations, serving to clarify hierarchic phrase structure. Finally, notes belonging to the underlying harmonies tend to be displaced more than nonharmonic tones, a tendency which is more pronounced at downbeats. These rhythmic procedures are thus found to be related to musical structure in a variety of ways.