Limits of rhythm perception.
To what extent are listeners sensitive to the time intervals separating non-consecutive events in sound sequences? The subjects of Experiment 1 were presented with sequences of 20 identical tones in which the 10 odd-numbered tones or the 10 even-numbered tones made up an isochronous sub-sequence (with a periodicity of 0.5-1 s) whereas the other tones, acting as distractors, occurred at random moments. Such sequences appeared to be very difficult to discriminate from sequences without any timing regularity, which revealed a lack of perceptual sensitivity to their "second-order" intervals. Experiment 2 employed repetitive sequences in which the first-order intervals (separating consecutive tones) took two possible values, forming a ratio that subjects had to classify as larger or smaller than 2. The results of this experiment suggest that subjects were able to make use of second-order intervals in their task, but mainly due to the predictable nature of the sequences; the relative positions of subjective accents (Povel & Essens, 1985) had no significant effect on performance. It is concluded that the perception of subtle timing details in "ordinary" music may rest on nothing more than a sensitivity to the relations between first-order intervals (within a given auditory stream).
Demany
Laurent
L
Laboratoire de Neurophysiologie, UMR CNRS 5543, Université Victor Segalen, Bordeaux, France. laurent.demany@psyac.u-bordeaux2.fr
Semal
Catherine
C
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013998:Time Perception