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.

LISTENERS ARE THOUGHT TO BE CAPABLE of perceiving multiple voices in music. This paper presents different views of what 'voice' means and how the problem of voice separation can be systematically described, with a view to understanding the problem better and developing a systematic description of the cognitive task of segregating voices in music. Well-established perceptual principles of auditory streaming are examined and then tailored to the more specific problem of voice separation in timbrally undifferentiated music. Adopting a perceptual view of musical voice, a computational prototype is developed that splits a musical score (symbolic musical data) into different voices. A single 'voice' may consist of one or more synchronous notes that are perceived as belonging to the same auditory stream. The proposed model is tested against a small dataset that acts as ground truth. The results support the theoretical viewpoint adopted in the paper.