The relationship between perceptual organization and emotional effect of music : Cognitive modeling and cross-cultural investigation

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The interplay between the processes of metrical and tonal organization in melody perception was investigated. Ten musicians listened to five variations of excerpts from each of 12 melodies and judged the keys and rhythms. Original-condition-trials retained the original temporal and pitch patterns of the melodies. Either temporal or pitch pattern was shifted in phase one or two notes and recombined with the other pattern to create the temporal-shift and the pitch-shift conditions. The result showed that the listeners' key interpretation varied among the temporal shift conditions, but their metrical interpretation did not vary among the pitch-shift conditions. These results suggested that, though tonal organization is influenced by metrical organization, tonal organization does not influence metrical organization. That is, in the process of melody perception tonal organization is based on the result of metrical organization.We, then, constructed a computational model that predicted a plausible key and tonality for any given melody (Western-tonal) sequence, through a step-wise, incremental series of computations. In an experiment, 13 musically trained participants listened to 30 Bach fugue subjects and random melodies and were asked to identify plausible keys and rate the tonality of the keys. The incremental predictions of our computational model were compared to the behavior of the human participants, as well as to predictions derived from models developed by Krumhansl and Longuet-Higgins & Steedman. Our computational model provided the best fitting cognitive model of the process of participants' tonal organization in melody perception.