What factors influence listeners’ perception of meter in a musical piece or a musical style? Many cues are available in the musical “surface,” i.e., the pattern of sounds physically present during listening. Models of meter processing focus on the musical surface. However, percepts of meter and other musical features may also be shaped by reactivation of previously heard music, consistent with exemplar accounts of memory. The current study explores a phenomenon that is here termed metrical restoration : listeners who hear melodies with ambiguous meters report meter preferences that match previous listening experiences in the lab, suggesting reactivation of those experiences. Previous studies suggested that timbre and brief rhythmic patterns may influence metrical restoration. However, variations in the magnitude of effects in different experiments suggest that other factors are at work. Experiments reported here explore variation in metrical restoration as a function of: melodic diversity in timbre and tempo, associations of rhythmic patterns with particular melodies and meters, and associations of meter with overall melodic form . Rhythmic patterns and overall melodic form, but not timbre, had strong influences. Results are discussed with respect to style-specific or culture-specific musical processing, and everyday listening experiences. Implications for models of musical memory are also addressed.

There has recently been renewed interest in using quantitative data to explore questions about musical universals. One explanation for certain musical universals is that they reflect ways of singing that are most energetically efficient, as opposed to biological specializations for human music. Previous research found support for this “motor constraint hypothesis” by comparing pitch contour shapes in samples of human and avian songs, but the sample of human songs was limited to notated scores of European and Chinese folk songs from the Essen database. Here we test this hypothesis using a more diverse global sample of human music recordings from the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music . By directly comparing pitch contour shapes in a diverse sample of human songs and bird songs, we found that both human and bird songs tend to employ similar descending/arched melodic contours despite substantial differences in absolute pitch and duration. This preference was consistent for both Western and non-Western songs. Surprisingly, we also found that the global samples of human and bird song contours were significantly more correlated with one another than either was with the Essen contours. Our findings of broad cross-cultural and cross-species parallels support the motor constraint hypothesis for melodic contour. More generally, our findings demonstrate the importance of greater collaboration between ethnomusicology and music psychology.

Melodic contour, or the pattern of rises and falls in pitch, is a critical component of melodic structure, and has an important impact on listeners' perceptions of, and memory for, music. Despite its centrality, few formal models of contour structure exist. One recent exception involves characterizing contour by the relative degrees of strength of its cyclic information, quantified via a Fourier analysis of the pitch code of the contour. Three experiments explored the applicability of this approach, demonstrating that listeners' similarity ratings for pairs of melodies were predictable from Fourier analysis quantifications of rhythmically complex (Experiment 1) and rhythmically simple (Experiment 2) melodies, as well as for derived similarity measures based on melodic complexity judgments (Experiment 3). These findings indicate that Fourier analysis is an effective model of melodic contour, and that it can predict perceived melodic similarity.