title: Rhythm histograms and musical meter: A corpus study of Malian percussion music.
abstract: Studies of musical corpora have given empirical grounding to the various features that characterize particular musical styles and genres. Palmer & Krumhansl (1990) found that in Western classical music the likeliest places for a note to occur are the most strongly accented beats in a measure, and this was also found in subsequent studies using both Western classical and folk music corpora (Huron & Ommen, 2006; Temperley, 2010). We present a rhythmic analysis of a corpus of 15 performances of percussion music from Bamako, Mali. In our corpus, the relative frequency of note onsets in a given metrical position does not correspond to patterns of metrical accent, though there is a stable relationship between onset frequency and metrical position. The implications of this non-congruence between simple statistical likelihood and metrical structure for the ways in which meter and metrical accent may be learned and understood are discussed, along with importance of cross-cultural studies for psychological research.
authors.affiliation: Carleton College, Music, 1 North College Street, Northfield, MN, 55057, USA. jlondon@carleton.edu.
authors.forename: Justin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: London
authors.affiliation: Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, Unter Krahnenbäumen 87, 50668, Cologne, Germany.
authors.forename: Rainer
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Polak
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Nori
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Jacoby
mesh_terms: D001307:Auditory Perception; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music; D011336:Probability; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013998:Time Perception; D014741:Video Recording
keywords: Cross-cultural study; Musical rhythm; Situated cognition