Scales from divergent musical cultures tend to have both intuitive structural similarities and one common functional property: within a given scale, each note takes on a unique shade of meaning in the context of the scale as a whole. It may be that certain structural traits facilitate this functional property—in other words, that scales with particular structural characteristics are more globally integrated and capable of being processed in a top-down manner. Representing pitch collections as bit strings, the current work shows that in Western European, Northern Indian, and Japanese traditional musics, collections that are more densely packed with recursively nested non-overlapping, uniquely identifiable repeated substrings (more hierarchizable ) are more likely to appear as scales ( p = .002).

This study explores the underlying mechanisms responsible for the perception of cadential closure in Mozart’s keyboard sonatas. Previous investigations into the experience of closure have typically relied upon the use of abstract harmonic formulæ as stimuli. However, these formulæ often misrepresent the ways in which composers articulate phrase endings in tonal music. This study, on the contrary, examines a wide variety of cadential types typically found in the classical style, including evaded cadences, which have yet to be examined in an experimental setting. The present findings reveal that cadential categories play a pivotal role in the perception of closure, and for musicians especially, ratings of the cadential categories provide empirical support for a model of cadential strength proposed in music theory. A number of rhetorical features also affect participants' ratings of closure, such as formal context, the presence of a melodic dissonance at the cadential arrival, and the use of a trill within the penultimate dominant. Finally, the results indicate that expertise modulates attention, with musicians privileging bass-line motion and nonmusicians attending primarily to the soprano voice.

Despite the plethora of research on the role of tonality and meter in music perception, there is little work on how these fundamental properties function together. The most basic question is whether the two hierarchical structures are correlated – that is, do metrically stable positions in the measure preferentially feature tonally stable pitches, and do tonally stable pitches occur more often than not at metrically stable locations? To answer this question, we analyzed a corpus of compositions by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, tabulating the frequency of occurrence of each of the 12 pitch classes at all possible temporal positions in the bar. There was a reliable relation between the tonal and metric hierarchies, such that tonally stable pitch classes and metrically stable temporal positions co-occurred beyond their simple joint probability. Further, the pitch class distribution at stable metric temporal positions agreed more with the tonal hierarchy than at less metrically stable locations. This tonal-metric hierarchy was largely consistent across composers, time signatures, and modes. The existence, profile, and constancy of the tonal-metric hierarchy is relevant to several areas of music cognition research, including pitch-time integration, statistical learning, and global effects of tonality.

although music's repetitiveness has been a perennial topic of theoretical and philosophical interest, we know surprisingly little about the psychological processes underlying it. As one step in the larger enterprise of examining the psychology of musical repetition, a preliminary question addresses repetition detection: Which repetitions are listeners able to identify as such, and how does this ability change across repeated exposures of the same work? In this study, participants with minimal formal training heard short excerpts and were instructed to press a button whenever they heard something from earlier in the piece repeat. Additional exposures facilitated repetition detection for long units, but impaired repetition detection for short ones, exposing an attentional shift toward larger temporal spans across multiple hearings.

the normalized pairwise variability index (npvi) , originally developed for the analysis of speech prosody, has been shown to be a useful tool in the analysis of the rhythmic variability present in individual melodies and melodic corpuses (Patel & Daniele, 2003a; Huron & Ollen, 2003; Patel, Iverson, & Rosenberg, 2006). Here we suggest a number of rhythmic refinements for the application of the nPVI in musical contexts. These include (a) applying the nPVI metric to higher levels of rhythmic structure, (b) taking metrical structure (duple versus triple) into account, and (c) using alternative codings for surface durations. A reanalysis of the data from Patel & Daniele (2003a) is given as a demonstration of the utility of these refinements for the analysis of musical styles and repertoires; other possible refinements are discussed.