Re: Rhythm

["Steven M. Boker" <sboker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Bill,

You might take a look at Bruno Repp's work.  He has reported that
the ability to perceive the timing change is highly dependent on
the structure of the musical piece in which it is embedded.  He
analyzes classical recordings and looks at rubato (timing changes)
that occur in performance.  He has then found that the ability to
notice a single note timing change in a MIDI generated piece that
is "perfectly" timed is degraded in the same places that rubato
would have been performed by a professional musician.

@ARTICLE{Repp92a,
        AUTHOR = {Repp, B. H.},
        TITLE = {Probing the cognitive representation of musical
time--structural constraints on the perception of timing perturbations},
        JOURNAL = {Cognition},
        VOLUME = {44},
        PAGES = {241--281},
        YEAR = {1992}
}

As is often the case, the answer to your question seems to be "it depends".

Cheers,
Steve

---
 Steven M. Boker                                 219-631-4941 (voice)
 sboker@nd.edu                                   219-631-8883 (fax)
 http://www.nd.edu/~sboker/                      219-257-2956 (home)
 Dept. of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556