The Influence of Higher-Order Musical Pattern Structure on Perception, Attention, and Memory

Peter Q. Pfordresher, David D. Luxton, Institute For Music Research

David Tempereley, Eastman School of Music

Scott Lipscomb, Northwestern

Mari Riess Jones, Ohio State

Various projects have explored the way in which serial trajectories formed by melodic (pitch-related) and/or rhythmic (time-related) change in a melody provide for the listener a higher-order time frame (e.g. meter) that guides melodic processing. The core hypothesis of this work is that melodies are more easily perceived, attended to, and (as a result) remembered when this higher-order structure is temporally stable and matches time-based expectancies in the listener. Theoretical goals of this research include a better understanding of the role of stimulus structure in perception and cognition, contributions of dynamic (pattern-related) and schematic (memory-related) structures to music listening, and comparisons between the perception of pitch and time in the context of musical patterns. Applied goals include a better understanding of what compositional techniques may yield more or less memorable melodies, and components of similarity in music. This work has yielded one published journal article (Jones & Pfordresher 1997), and one paper under review (Pfordresher, submitted-b). Two new manuscripts are at the beginning stages (Pfordresher, Tempereley & Luxton, in preparation; Pfordresher, Lipscomb, Jones & Luxton, in preparation).

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