salience of pitch-time patterns

[Richard Parncutt <richard.parncutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear cocktail party guests,

As the festive season reaches its climax, I'm planning research that
will marry Terhardt and Bregman (not another cocktail party...) by
allowing estimates of pitch salience in complex sounds to depend on the
temporal context in which the sound appears. The long-term aim is to
develop a model of tonal music perception that takes into account
effects of streaming (voice leading, counterpoint) on pitch salience
within musical chords.

My question is, now that I've attracted everyone's attention and
attentuated the masking babble: Is anyone estimating the SALIENCE of
perceptual groupings within the auditory scene, on the basis either of
experimental data or of model outputs? I'm operationally defining
salience either as the subjective strength of a percept or grouping, or
the probability that a given percept or grouping will be perceived (or
attract attention).

The corresponding experiment would resemble the Shepard-Krumhansl
probe-tone paradigm, in which listeners hear a test sound followed by a
probe and indicate how well the probe goes with the test (or whether the
probe is part of the test). In this case, unlike Shepard-Krumhansl, the
probe would not be a single tone, but a sequence of two or more tones.

Richard Parncutt

Dept. of Musicology, Univ. of Graz, Mozartgasse 3, 8010 Graz, Austria
Tel+43-316 380-2409/-2405  Fax-9755  richard.parncutt@kfunigraz.ac.at

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