Resonance in the Perception of Musical Pulse

Abstract

A number of phenomena related to the perception of isochronous tone sequences peak at a certain rate (or tempo) and taper off at both slower and faster rates. In the present paper we start from the hypothesis that the peaking finds its origin in the presence of a damped resonating oscillator in the perceptual-motor system. We assume that for pulse perception only the ‘effective’ resonance curve matters, i.e., the enhancement of the amplitude of the oscillator beyond the critical damping. On the basis of the effective resonance curve, analyses have been made of data of Vos (1973) on subjective rhythmization and of data on tapping along isochronous tone sequences (Parncutt, 1994) and polyrhythmic sequences (Handel & Oshinsky, 1981). The results show that these data can be very well approximated with the proposed model. The best results are obtained with a resonance period of 500-550 ms and a width at half height of about 400-800 ms. A comparison is made with a number of other tempo related phenomena. In the second part a preliminary effort is made to determine the distribution of perceived tempi of musical pieces heard on the radio and in recordings of several styles, by having a number of listeners tapping along these pieces. The resonance curve appears to be a good tool to characterize these distributions.