Subject: periodicity digest From: "O.T.Furnes" <oddtf(at)imt.uio.no> Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 09:25:58 +0200Here are the replies to my question about periodicity (remember?....). I am very sorry about the delay! Also, I am very grateful for the response! Odd Torleiv Furnes Department of Musicology University of Oslo Norway oddtf(at)imt.uio.no ____________________ The question: Could anyone recommend litterature/research about the cognitive "measurement of time"? - Are there any unambiguous findings that proclaim an abstract sub-division of time in order to predict the temporal placement of an upcoming event? In other words, are there indications of a subconscious metrical grid that any sound event is analyzed by? And the replies: *------*------*------*------*------* Richard Feynman and john Tukey got interested in perceptual time and did a bunch of experiments on it. I is written up in one of his many books. If you are interested, it is in "The pleasure of finding things out", Perseus Publishing, Helix Books, Ch. 11 Jont B. Allen AT&T Labs-Research, Shannon Laboratory, E161 180 Park Ave., Florham Park NJ, 07932-0971 973/360-8545voice, x7111fax, http://www.research.att.com/~jba *------*------*------*------*------* You should check the extensive literature on perceptual experiments and modeling of time-keeping, rhythm and meter production and perception. Important authors in the musical domain include Paul Fraisse, Jean Michon, Mari Jones, Carolyn Drake, Carolyn Palmer, Eric Clarke, Neil Todd, Ed Large, Peter Desain, Henkjan Honing, Devin McAuley, Dirk Povel among many others. Several special issues of peer-reviewed journals have come out of the Rhythm Perception and Production workshop series. -- Stephen McAdams Equipe Perception et Cognition Musicales Ircam-CNRS (UMR 9912) 1 place Igor-Stravinsky F-75004 Paris, France tel: +33.1.4478.4838, fax +33.1.4478.1540 http://www.ircam.fr/pcm/ *------*------*------*------*------* Whether or not a temporal interval is cognitively subdivided depends very much on a listener's strategy and on preceding context. A metrical grid needs to be induced by context or deliberately created; it does not usually arise automatically. I suggest you look at the many papers by Mari Riess Jones, starting with Barnes, R., & Jones, M. R. (2000). Expectancy, attention, and time. Cognitive Psychology, 41, 254-311. and Large, E. W., & Jones, M. R. (1999). The dynamics of attending: How we track time-varying events. Psychological Review, 106, 119-159. where you will find references to earlier papers. Also relevant is Desain, P. (1992). A (de)composable theory of rhythm perception. Music Perception, 9, 439-454. A researcher who has been specifically concerned with mental subdivision is Simon Grondin. See Grondin, S., Meilleur-Wells, G., & Lachance, R. (1999). When to start explicit counting in a time-intervals discrimination task: A critical point in the timing process of humans. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 993-1004. and earlier references cited therein. The variability of time interval perception or production is a good indicator of whether or not cognitive subdivision occurred. A classic reference on beat ("clock") induction is Povel, D.-J., & Essens, P. (1985). Perception of temporal patterns. Music Perception, 2, 411-440. I am myself interested in this topic and am currently conducting research relevant to it, but nothing is written up yet. Best, Bruno Bruno H. Repp Research Scientist Haskins Laboratories 270 Crown Street New Haven, CT 06511-6695 Tel. (203) 865-6163, ext. 236 FAX (203) 865-8963 e-mail: repp(at)tom.haskins.yale.edu *------*------*------*------*------* You might glance at two recent papers: Large & Jones (1999) Psychological Review, volume 106, pg 116 -159. Barnes & Jones (2000) Cognitive Psychology (recent issue). mrj Mari Riess Jones Professor Department of Psychology 142 Townshend Hall The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio 43210 Phone: 614-292-4206 Fax: 614-292-5601 email: jones.80(at)osu.edu lab web site: http://www.psy.ohio-state.edu/roar *------*------*------*------*------* Dear Dr. Furnes, I am intrigued by your question since I am working on an animal model where time of analyzing a particular input may be of importance. The pallid bat uses 2-6 msec high-frequency (30-60 kHz) echolocation to avoid obstacles. It uses passive hearing of 5-10 msec low-frequency (5-30 kHz) prey-generated noise to localize terrestrial prey. If it is not possible to process 2 streams of acoustic information simultaneously, an alternative hypothesis is that the bat switches rapidly between processing one or the other sound. In that case, it is likely that some temporal mechanism is in place to facilitate this process. Regards, Khaleel A. Razak Neuorscience Program Dept. of Zoology/Physiology University of Wyoming Laramie, WY - 82071 *------*------*------*------*------* The simple answer to your question is Yes, there is clear evidence of a tendency of humans to subdivide a time cycle into whole numbered fractions (eg, halves, thirds, quarters, etc). `Meter' is a universal human behavior. Let me know if I can help you further. Im very interested in this topic and the ways in which ordinary speech (and especially ritualized speech like prayers, unison text repetition, tour guide speech, train conductor speech, etc etc) resembles simple music. May I recommend a paper of mine called `Naive time, temporal patterns and human audition' that appeared in R. Port and T. van Gelder `Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition' MITP, 1995. It doesnt deal directly with music, but is certainly related. You might also be interested in some other papers of mine that you can get from my webpage. Good luck, Bob Port ( ( ( O ) ) ) ( ( ( O ) ) ) ( ( ( O ) ) ) Lingstcs/Comp Sci/Cogntv Sci ROBERT F. PORT 330 Memorial Hall, Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47405 812-855-9217 Fx 812-855-5363 http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port *------*------*------*------*------* Dear Torleiv, that is a very interesting question! you might know already Al Bregman's work about temporal order, and you might need to specify the first part of your question a bit more ("Could anyone recommend literature/research about the cognitive "measurement of time"?), because there is a lot of stuff published about temporal procession in the auditory system. For a start in psychophysics, i can recommend a chapter by D. Eddins and D. Green, about "Temporal integration and temporal resolution" in "Hearing", ed. by BCJ Moore, Academic Press, Handbook of Perception and Cognition, 2nd ed., 1995. This is not very "cognitive", but gives you a good feeling for important basic properties of the auditory system. Also, you might check the research by a group in Munich, Germany (Poeppel and Steinbuechel, german oe and ue, visit Marc Christoph Wittmann's (who is a lecturer in this group) web page: http://www.med.uni-muenchen.de/medpsy/time/marc.htm. hope this helps a bit, best wishes, and merry christmas, marina ps my background is in biology and psychophysics, and i'm interested in "time perception" in a wide sense. i guess your background is in music? than you might also check research by Neil Todd (manchester, england, http://www.psy.man.ac.uk/Staff/NTodd/) - he published some very interesting findings about rhythm perception. -- marina rose university laboratory of physiology parks road, oxford, u.k. tel.: 0044 1865 272495; internal: 72495 *------*------*------*------*------* >From Peter Lennox: I'd be very interested. You could check out O'Keefe, who (I seem to remember) talks about a 'clock' mechanism based on synchronous neural firings, though he does so in order to discuss spatial perception, rather than temporal perception. Sorry, I don't have the reference here, but he had a paper in a publication by Eilan, McCarthy and Brewer; something like "Spatial Representation". regards ppl *------*------*------*------*------* You might want to look at: STRUCTURING TEMPORAL SEQUENCES - COMPARISON OF MODELS AND FACTORS OF COMPLEXITY ESSENS P,PERCEPTION & PSYCHOPHYSICS, 57: (4) 519-532 MAY 1995. here's the abstract: Two stages for structuring tone sequences have been distinguished by Povel and Essens (1985). In the first, a mental clock segments a sequence into equal time units (clock model); in the second, intervals are specified in terms of subdivisions of these units. The present findings support the clock model in that it predicts human performance better than three other algorithmic models. Two further experiments in which clock and subdivision characteristics were varied did not support the hypothesized effect of the nature of the subdivisions on complexity. A model focusing on the variations in the beat-anchored envelopes of the tone clusters was proposed. Errors in reproduction suggest a dual-code representation comprising temporal and figural characteristics. The temporal part of the representation is based on the clock model but specifies, in addition, the metric of the level below the clock. The beat-tone-cluster envelope concept was proposed to specify the figural part. Jim Ballas ballas(at)itd.nrl.navy.mil *------*------*------*------*------* the following references may be relevant: Hooper, S. L. (1998). Transduction of temporal patterns by single neurons. Nature Neuroscience, 1(8), 720-726. Hazeltine, E., Helmuth, L. L., & Ivry, R. B. (1997). Neural mechanisms of timing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1(5), 163-169. Ivry, R. B., & Hazeltine, R. E. (1995). Perception and production of temporal intervals across a range of durations: Evidence for a common timing mechanism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21(1), 3-18. Franck Ramus Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience 17 Queen Square London WC1N 3AR GB tel: (+44) 20 7679 1138 fax: (+44) 20 7813 2835 f.ramus(at)ucl.ac.uk http://www.ehess.fr/centres/lscp/persons/ramus/ *------*------*------*------*------* >From Eliot Handelman: The whole literature on the habituation of the orienting response dealt with this. I'm not up on the latest stuff, but E. N. Sokolov proposed what he called a "neuronal model" which was just the kind of "subconscious grid" you seem to be thinking of. There's also Richard Held. Held R. "Perception and its neuronal mechanisms," Cognition, 33:139-154 Sokolov, E.N. "Perception and the conditioned reflex" Waydenfeld, S. W. trans, NY: Macmillan 1963 *------*------*------*------*------* *------*------*------*------*------* *------*------*------*------*------*