The first and second authors were supported by an EPSRC DTA (www.epsrc.ac.uk) studentship

A LeBlanc

Andrew J. R. Simpson

BH Repp

C Drake

C Palmer

Christopher A. Harte

Chunyang Song

DJ Povel

EE Hannon

HC Longuet-Higgins

I Shmulevich

J Snyder

Joel Snyder

KC Smith

LJ Trainor

Marcus T. Pearce

Mark B. Sandler

P Toiviainen

RA Duke

S Handel

SB Kamenetsky

TR Bergeson

WT Fitch

PLoS ONE

PubMed

Song Chunyang

Simpson Andrew J. R.

Harte Christopher A.

Pearce Marcus T.

Sandler Mark B.

Public Library of Science (PLOS)

Syncopation and the Score

Crossref

Song, C

Simpson, AJR

Harte, CA

Pearce, MT

Sandler, MB

Queen Mary Research Online

The score is a symbolic encoding that describes a piece of music, written according to the conventions of music theory, which must be rendered as sound (e.g., by a performer) before it may be perceived as music by the listener. In this paper we provide a step towards unifying music theory with music perception in terms of the relationship between notated rhythm (i.e., the score) and perceived syncopation. In our experiments we evaluated this relationship by manipulating the score, rendering it as sound and eliciting subjective judgments of syncopation. We used a metronome to provide explicit cues to the prevailing rhythmic structure (as defined in the time signature). Three-bar scores with time signatures of 4/4 and 6/8 were constructed using repeated one-bar rhythm-patterns, with each pattern built from basic half-bar rhythm-components. Our manipulations gave rise to various rhythmic structures, including polyrhythms and rhythms with missing strong- and/or down-beats. Listeners (N = 10) were asked to rate the degree of syncopation they perceived in response to a rendering of each score. We observed higher degrees of syncopation in time signatures of 6/8, for polyrhythms, and for rhythms featuring a missing down-beat. We also found that the location of a rhythm-component within the bar has a significant effect on perceived syncopation. Our findings provide new insight into models of syncopation and point the way towards areas in which the models may be improved

Andrew J R Simpson

Christopher A Harte

Marcus T Pearce

Mark B Sandler

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Syncopation and the score.

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Syncopation and the Score

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Public Library of Science (PLOS)

Crossref

Queen Mary Research Online

Public Library of Science (PLOS)

Directory of Open Access Journals