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Desain, P. and Honing, H. (submitted) What are rhythm percepts made of?.

Abstract

Thanks to an extensive body of psychophysical research there is considerable understanding of the perception of isolated time intervals and isochronous sequences (van Noorden, 1975; Handel, 1989; Michon, 1967; 1975; 1985). However, true musical rhythmic material is much more complex: it consists of richly structured sequences of time durations. How these rhythmical patterns are recognized, remembered or reproduced is hardly understood. In this paper we propose a mental representation that can explain the formation of a stable and structurally integrated percept for a perceived temporal sequence. This model is an elaboration of a theory of rhythm perception, named DECO (Desain, 1992), that is based on time intervals between any pair of onsets in a temporal pattern and, more specifically, on bounds between successive intervals whose durations relate as simple integer ratios. The definition of the internal stability of this mental representation of rhythm depends on the contributions of each bound and resembles the way in which in chemistry the stability of a molecule depends on the strengths of the bounds between its atoms. When subjects were asked to identify rhythmic categories from performed temporal patterns, the proportion of occurrence of hundreds of rhythms in the responses was predictable with high accuracy using this theory, which contains only a few parameters.