Detectability of duration and intensity increments in melody tones: a partial connection between music perception and...

Two experiments demonstrate positional variation in the relative detectability of, respectively, local temporal and dynamic perturbations in an isochronous and isodynamic sequence of melody tones, played on a computer-controlled piano. This variation may reflect listeners' expectations of expressive performance microstructure (the top-down hypothesis), or it may be due to psychoacoustic (pitch-related) stimulus factors (the bottom-up hypothesis). Percent correct scores for increments in tone duration correlated significantly with the average timing profile of pianists' expressive performances of the music, as predicted specifically by the top-down hypothesis. For intensity increments, the analogous perception-performance correlation was weak and the bottom-up factors of relative pitch height and/or direction of pitch change accounted for some of the perceptual variation. Subjects' musical training increased overall detection accuracy but did not affect the positional variation in accuracy scores in either experiment. These results are consistent with the top-down hypothesis for timing, but they favor the bottom-up hypothesis for dynamics. The perception-performance correlation for timing may also be viewed as being due to complex stimulus properties such as tonal motion and tension/relaxation that influence performers and listeners in similar ways.