Cecilia Taher, Rene´ Rusch, & Stephen McAdams · 306 Cecilia Taher, Rene´ Rusch, & Stephen McAdams. Mackworth’s (1969), and Synder’s (2000) habituation models,andGatiandBen-Shakhar’s(1990)andCowan’s

EFFE CTS OF REP ET ITIO N ON AT TE NTI ON IN TWO-PART COUNTERPOINT

CEC ILIA TAHER, RENE RUS CH, & STE PH EN MCADA MS

McGill University, Montreal, Canada

REPETITION AND NOVELTY ARE ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS

of tonal music. Previous research suggests that thedegree of repetitiveness of a line can determine its rel-ative melodicity within a musical texture. Concordantly,musical accompaniments tend to be highly repetitive,probably facilitating listeners’ tendency to focus on andfollow the melodic lines they support. With the aim ofcontributing to the unexplored area of the relationshipbetween repetition and attention in polyphonic musiclistening, this paper presents an empirical investigationof the way listeners attend to exact and immediatereiterations of musical fragments in two-part contra-puntal textures. Participants heard original excerptscomposed of a repetitive and a nonrepetitive part, con-tinuously rating the relative prominence of the twovoices. The results indicate that the line that consistsof immediate and exact repetitions of a short musicalfragment tends to perceptually decrease in salience forthe listener. This suggests that musical repetition playsa significant role in dynamically shaping listeners’ per-ceptions of musical texture by affecting the relative per-ceived importance of simultaneous parts.

Received: July 7, 2014, accepted April 23, 2015.

Key words: repetition, attention, voice prominence,stream segregation, texture

P RIOR RESEARCH HAS ACKNOWLEDGED THE

importance of repetition in music perception (fora review, see Margulis, 2014). To our knowledge,

however, little attention has been given to the effects ofrepetition of any kind on the relative salience of simul-taneous lines in a polyphonic texture. This paper contri-butes to this unexplored area of research by presenting anempirical investigation of the effects of exact and imme-diate repetition on the listener’s attention to simulta-neous lines in two-part tonal counterpoint.

‘‘Repetition progressively frees the mind fromattention to details . . . and reduces the extent towhich consciousness must concern itself with the pro-cess’’ (Huey 1908/1968, p. 104). Whether it is starting

a new sport, understanding a new concept, learninga new song, determining if an animal is dangerous, oranalyzing the source of an unfamiliar scary sound inthe middle of the night, processing novelty andchange demands levels of attention that becomeunnecessary with repeated encounters. Repetitionleads to automatization, allowing attention to focuselsewhere.

Music is a highly repetitive phenomenon. Its repet-itiveness is manifested in the most diverse ways,including the tendency of most composers to restatematerial within and across pieces. Similarly, musicalaccompaniments tend to be highly repetitive, perhapsfacilitating a listener’s tendency to naturally focus onand follow the melodic lines they support. Based onthis rationale, which is supported by previousresearch showing that changes in the auditory fieldattract attention and that melodic lines are less repet-itive than nonmelodic lines, this paper investigates theeffects of musical repetition on the way listenersattend to the simultaneous lines of two-part contra-puntal textures.

A considerable amount of literature in vision andaudition supports the idea that changes in the physicalproperties of a stimulus can enhance our perception ofit, particularly when the visual or auditory field is rela-tively simple (see Spence & Santangelo, 2010, fora review in audition; and Dalton & Spence, 2008, andCowan, 1995, for summaries in vision and audition).For instance, studies have shown that the introductionof new and relatively salient acoustic features, such asa change in gender of a speaking voice within a messagethat participants are instructed to disregard, can cap-ture attention (Lawson, 1966; Treisman & Riley, 1969).It has also been demonstrated that pre-exposure to anaudio message that is used as a distractor during a suc-ceeding memory task that requires either auditory(Waters, McDonald, & Koresko, 1977) or visual atten-tion (Morris & Jones, 1990) facilitates performance,further suggesting that relatively familiar audio linesmay play a role in directing the attentional focus toother, more novel stimuli occurring concurrently. Thenotion that changes in acoustic features can trigger ashift of attention—the orienting response (Pavlov, 1927/1960)—constitutes the basis of many proposed modelsof selective auditory attention, such as Sokolov’s (1963),

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306 Cecilia Taher, Rene Rusch, & Stephen McAdams

Mackworth’s (1969), and Synder’s (2000) habituationmodels, and Gati and Ben-Shakhar’s (1990) and Cowan’s(1995) theories of attention and memory. The orient-ing response hypothesis has also received importantsupport in the field of auditory neuroscience (for areview, see Naatanen, Paavilainen, Rinne, & Alho, 2007).

Undoubtedly, the attention-capturing effect of a soundis accompanied by its segregation from the auditoryenvironment. Although it is still debatable whether theseparation process precedes or follows the attentionalattitude (for a review, see Francis, 2011), researchersgenerally agree that listeners are able to separate almostinstantly the sounds they attend to. Furthermore, inmany auditory scenarios, attending to a specific com-ponent is a voluntary action, rather than an automaticone. This seems to be the case for music, where multiplemeaningful or attractive sounds frequently occur insimultaneity. In most relatively simple polyphonicmusical settings, listeners can differentiate textural com-ponents by parsing the acoustic input into streams—a process defined as ‘‘stream segregation’’ by Bregman(1990)—which can then be individually attended to ina voluntary manner (Bregman, 1990; Bregman & Rud-nicky, 1975). This is to say that listeners can choose tofollow a distinct musical line within the polyphony, suchas the main melody, the bass or the line of a particularinstrument. Research has shown that, even in simplepolyphonic textures, listeners tend to focus their atten-tion on only one stream (Bregman, 1990; Kahneman,1973), incorporating the remaining textural compo-nents either in a figure-ground relationship (Slobodaand Edworthy’s, 1981, figure-ground model) or in a moreintegrative polyphonic whole (Bigand, McAdams, &Foret’s, 2000, integration model; and Davison & Bank’s,2003, experimental study on two-part counterpoint, par-ticularly for voices moving in parallel). In other words,dividing attention equally is extremely difficult duringpolyphonic music listening, even in simple two-voicetextures.

The important role that stream segregation and atten-tion play in polyphonic music listening has inspired theinvestigation of the perception of simultaneous parts inmusic. Studies have ranged from examining the diverseaspects of stream segregation in multivoiced music lis-tening (Huron, 1989, 2001; Huron & Fantini, 1989;Palmer & Holleran, 1994; Thompson, 1993) and perfor-mance (Gingras, 2008; Palmer, 1996), to computationalmodels based on specific musical features (for a review,see Temperley, 2013). Nevertheless, research that specif-ically focuses on the connections between attention andthe perception of simultaneous musical streams isnoticeably sparse. Beyond the few studies mentioned

above, Francis (2011) proposes, to our knowledge, themost comprehensive model of attention in polyphonicmusic listening. She describes a set of preference rules toaccount for the effects of different musical (bottom-up)factors on attention in polyphony: registral position,loudness, timbre, articulation, chromatic pitches,accented nonchord tones, variety in pitch, rhythm, andtexture, and of particular relevance to our study, repe-tition. Her study provides experimental evidence for theperceptual salience of the highest part in a three-voicetexture and of lines containing chromatic pitches oraccented nonchord tones, as well as analytical, score-based support for the remaining attention-capturingfactors. Half of the preference rules proposed by Francis(2011) account exclusively for the attention-capturingpotential of novel musical events. These include: (1) thevariety rules, which refer to the preference for lines thatare relatively diverse in terms of their pitch or rhythmiccontent; (2) the harmonic novelty rules related to thepreference for lines that contain chromatic pitches ornonchord tones; and (3) the texture change rule, whichfavors the entrance of a new line. The importance ofnovelty for textural aspects of polyphonic music hasalso been supported by several theoretical (Meyer,1956, Chapter V; Rahn, 1982) and computational mod-els (Duane, 2012; Madsen & Widmer, 2007), demon-strating that lines that are more melodic have higherinformation content (more variability) than do linesthat are less melodic. This literature, along with Fran-cis’s preference rules, is consistent with the intuitionthat listeners more naturally pay attention to melodicrather than accompanimental lines. Musical composi-tions are usually remembered by their melodies ratherthan by their accompanying figurations.

To summarize our discussion up to this point, priorresearch indicates that (1) changes in the auditory envi-ronment capture attention, and (2) melodic lines, whichare the textural component most naturally attended toby listeners, are less repetitive than accompaniments.Taken together, these two points suggest that simplepolyphonic passages composed of streams that differgreatly among each other in terms of their repetitivesurface quality could induce an attention preference fora less repetitive line occurring at that moment. Thishypothesis, however, does not imply that any kind ofrepetitive line tends to discourage attention from thelistener in all types of multi-voiced music. In poly-phonic music, the effects of repetition on attention toa particular stream would seem to depend on at leasttwo factors: the specific features of all the componentmusical lines beyond their degree of repetitiveness andthe ways in which the restatement takes place. With

Effects of Repetition on Attention 307

respect to the first factor, several musical attributes caninfluence the way listeners naturally attend to the dif-ferent textural components of polyphonic music. Intonal music, a line that contradicts the expected syntaxmay capture attention independently of how repetitivethe line is. Similarly, the specific timbral, rhythmic,intensity, or melodic features of a musical layer couldinduce attraction. In regard to the second factor, musi-cal repetition occurs in many different forms, from thereiteration of a single note to the restatement of anentire passage. Furthermore, variations of a musical pas-sage are often regarded as forms of repetition, and thedegree of similarity that is required for a fragment to beconsidered a modification of another segment is highlydependent on the context and the listener.

Taking this into account, the effects of repetition onattention are likely to be determined by the kinds ofrepetition and variation that occur. At least five aspectsseem particularly relevant in this respect: (1) the imme-diacy of the repetition (i.e., whether the repeated seg-ments are adjacent or separated by other musicalmaterial); (2) the length of the restated fragment; (3)the number of reiterations; (4) the degree of variationof the musical restatement; and (5) the complexity ofthe texture where the repetition takes place.

In reference to the first point, the immediate repeti-tion of a single pitch might attract the listener’s atten-tion in certain musical settings, whereas the return ofa given musical note after an intervening passage ofmusic can be extremely difficult to notice. Conversely,a melodic line is more likely to capture the listener’sattention when it returns after a passage of contrastingmelodic material (i.e., when it has a recapitulary func-tion) than when it functions as an ostinato (i.e., when itrepeats persistently and uninterrupted).

With respect to the length of the restated fragmentand the number of times it is reiterated (points 2 and 3above), Margulis’s (2012) and Lidov’s (2005) work isparticularly relevant. Margulis found that repeated lis-tening to a musical segment—either through a singleexposure to a musical composition that containsrepeated fragments or through multiple exposures tothe same musical piece—facilitates repetition detectionfor long repetitive units, but impairs it for short units,especially when the passage is reiterated immediately. Inother words, as listeners are exposed to a musical pas-sage several times, their attention moves from shorter tolonger musical sections—from local to global levels ofthe formal structure. Intuiting the different ways inwhich musical repetition can influence attention, Lidovdistinguishes among formative, focal, and textural rep-etition. Formative repetition refers to single immediate

restatements of a musical fragment and to single andmultiple returns of a musical idea after interveningmaterial. According to Lidov, it logically fulfills a for-mal, segmenting function and does not necessarilyattract attention. Focal repetition applies to passagesin which a fragment is adjacently restated three or fourtimes and to repetitions that extend across the bound-aries of the large-scale formal structure. This type cre-ates a hypnotic state that results from a focus on therepeating action rather than on the repeated material.Textural repetition—which is most relevant to thispaper—takes place when a fragment is immediatelyrestated more than three or four times. It differs fromfocal repetition in that it draws the listeners’ attentionto a feature that changes or to a different voice withinthe texture.

Concerning the fourth point—the degree of variationof the musical restatement—varied and exact repetitioncan often have opposite attentional effects. Composi-tional and performance practice suggests that the incor-poration of certain modifications during the restatementof a musical line (the line being melodic or not) caneffectively capture the listeners’ attention. Based on sim-ilar grounds, paradigmatic music analysis (Nattiez, 1975;Ruwet, 1972) puts repetition and variation at the centerof musical syntax. And finally, concerning the fifth point,the attentional effects of repetition might be determinedby the complexity of the polyphonic texture: a singlerepetitive part occurring simultaneously with many novellines might affect the listeners’ attention in a differentway than many repetitive parts happening concurrentlywith one nonrepetitive part.

Based on this literature on attention and stream seg-regation, we hypothesize that when one line of a two-part contrapuntal texture consists exclusively of imme-diate and exact repetitions of a relatively short fragment,listeners will more naturally attend to the other, morechanging part. The experiments presented in this papertested this hypothesis.

Experiment 1

METHOD

Participants. Forty participants (aged 18-39 years, M ¼22.8, SD ¼ 4.41, 25 females) were recruited throughMcGill Classifieds Online and were paid for their par-ticipation. Four participants identified themselves asprofessional musicians and five other participantsreported having played an instrument for at least fiveyears. All participants received an audiogram before theexperiment and had a threshold lower than 20 dB HL(ISO 389-8, 2004; Martin & Champlin, 2000).


Stimuli. The stimuli were 24 two-part keyboard musicalexcerpts. They were played through Sennheiser HD280Pro headphones (Sennheiser Electronic GmbH, Wede-mark, Germany) at 60 dB SPL, as measured with a Bruel& Kjaer Type 2205 sound-level meter and Type 4153artificial ear coupled with headphones (Bruel & Kjær,Nærum, Denmark). Each musical example was com-posed of a repetitive and a nonrepetitive part in 4/4meter and was played back at a tempo of 80 beats perminute using the Finale piano sound samples. Eachexample was 25.5s long. To minimize potential con-founding effects—namely the rhythmic and melodicprofile of the two voices, their registral position andrelative speeds, and the length of the repeating frag-ment—the musical stimuli were composed by the firstauthor to ensure similarity and, to the extent possible,equality of repetitive and nonrepetitive parts in terms ofpitch-class and scale-degree content, rhythmic patternsand register, global and local melodic contours, approx-imate proportion of skips/leaps vs. stepwise motion, andtimbral and intensity characteristics. The examples werewritten in a free counterpoint style, and, at times, violatevoice-leading principles because of the compositionallimitations imposed by the experimental conditions andthe attempt to control for confounding factors. Therepetitive part consisted of two or four exact repetitionsof a four-measure or two-measure fragment, respec-tively. The nonrepetitive part avoided repetition asmuch as possible. In an effort to simplify and controlfor confounding effects, the rhythm of each part waskept constant, consisting of sixteenth notes, eighthnotes, or quarter notes. The repetitive unit was com-posed according to four different patterns: arpeggiated,melodic (simple), Alberti bass, and compound melodic.Ascending and descending arpeggios delineating triadsor seventh chords were favored in the first type, stepwisemotion with occasional leaps was featured in the secondtype, broken chords with a preference for low-high-middle-high pitch sequences prevailed in the third type,and an implied polyphony often emerged within thevoices of the examples representing the fourth type.These four patterns were used in order to control thedegree of melodicity of the stimuli: half of the stimuli—simple and compound melodic—represent patternstyles that most frequently have a melodic role, whereasthe other half—arpeggiated and Alberti bass—corre-spond to figurations that most commonly have anaccompanying function. In addition, the nonrepetitivepart was written to match the pattern style of the repet-itive part to the extent possible. In this way, the twoparts were quite similar in terms of their internalmelodic construction and the harmonic stability of their

component notes. An example of each stimulus type canbe seen in Figure 1 and heard online (Taher, 2013a), andscores for the totality of the stimuli can be consultedonline (Taher, 2013b). The examples shown in Figure 1were chosen to represent a variety of levels of the exper-imental factors. For instance, Figure 1.a illustrates anarpeggiated four-measure repetitive unit in the lowerpart. In this case, the repetitive voice moves slower thanthe nonrepetitive voice in a 1:2 relationship (two notesagainst one). In other stimuli, other rhythmic relation-ships were used, as explained below.

Procedure. The 24 stimuli were presented in randomorder to the participants, who performed a continuous-rating task on the relative perceived prominence of thetwo voices in each excerpt. All participants completed theexperiment using a slider on a continuous scale. Afterensuring that participants were familiar with the conceptof voice/part, they were told to use a slider box to con-tinuously indicate whether they heard the top or the bot-tom voice/part as more prominent, or the two parts asexactly equally prominent. For visual purposes, the sliderbox was separated into three regions of contrasting colorsthat corresponded to prominence of the upper voice,equal prominence of both voices, and prominence of thelower voice. All participants were instructed to use thebox continuously and it was carefully explained to themthat only the middle point of the central, equal-promi-nence region of the device—rather than the entire middleregion—corresponded to an actual and absolute equiva-lence in the salience of the two voices. Analyses of thecontinuous response data revealed gradual changes inslider values with high and low peaks rather than plateaus,confirming that the participants used the slider box ina continuous way. Presuming that the participants wouldpay equal attention to both voices at the very beginning ofeach example, the slider had to be positioned in the centerof the middle region before starting each trial.

Experimental design. The experimental design consistedof four factors: (a) Registral Position of the repetitivepart, which referred to the location of the repetitivepart––either in the lower or the upper voice; (b) Tem-poral Position, which compared the first and secondhalf of each musical example;1 (c) Relative Speed of therepetitive part with respect to the nonrepetitive part,which could be faster, equal or slower—the faster andslower speeds represented by 1:4 (one note against four)and 2:1 (two notes against one) proportions, respec-tively; and (d) Length of the repetitive unit, which con-sisted of two or four measures. Each cell of theexperimental design corresponded to two musical stim-uli (i.e., a total of two musical excerpts per cell;


consequently, only two of the four pattern-style typeswere represented per cell, because the four pattern styleswere not intended to be an experimental factor, butrather a way to control for confounds—i.e., to havestimuli representing both melodic and accompanimen-tal common patterns). This design allows not only forthe examination of the effects of repetition on voiceprominence under controlled situations, but also for theinvestigation of the potential influence of the relativespeeds of the two parts and the length of the repetitive

unit on the perceived prominence of the repetitive part.Each of the pattern-style types (arpeggiated, melodic,Alberti bass, and compound melodic) was distributed ina balanced manner within the experimental design. Spe-cifically, within each pattern-style type, half of the stimulihad two-measure repetitive units, whereas the other halfhad four-measure repetitive units. A different half of thesame pattern-style type corresponded to upper repetitiveparts, whereas the other half corresponded to lower ones.A third of the examples (of the same pattern-style type)

FIGURE 1. Examples of the four types of repeating structures in the musical stimuli.


each consisted of repeating parts moving at the samespeed, faster or slower than the nonrepeating part. Nev-ertheless, the specific combinations of the levels of theexperimental factors were not the same for each pat-tern-style type; as indicated above, the four patternstyles were incorporated for controlling purposes onlyand not as levels of an experimental factor.

Data analysis. The dependent variable was the averageslider position values for the first and second halves of

each trial. The raw data—i.e., exact values of the sliderposition, ranging from 0 to 1, every half second for allparticipants—were analyzed using a four-factorrepeated-measures ANOVA, with average perceivedprominence as a dependent variable. The values of thedependent variable corresponded to the position of theslider and could range between 0 and 1, with 0 and 1corresponding to maximum possible prominence of thelower and higher voice respectively and with 0.5 indi-cating exact equal salience for the two parts. Because the

FIGURE 1. [Continued]


participants were instructed to place the slider in thecenter of the middle region of the slider box in order toindicate equal prominence for both voices at the begin-ning of each musical example, the data corresponding tothe first 3s (first measure) of each stimulus wereexcluded from the statistical analyses. In this way, theresults reported here should not be affected by beha-viors that could have merely resulted from the instruc-tions of the experiment rather than from theparticipants’ own choices. Because of this 3-s ommis-sion, the averaged values compared seconds 3–11.5(first half of the entire stimulus—equivalent to the firsttwo statements and the initial presentation of the repet-itive unit in the stimuli with two-measure and four-measure repetitive units respectively—minus the first3s) and seconds 12–23 (second half of the entire stim-ulus including the final long note).

RESULTS

The statistical analysis revealed that in two-voice tex-tures in which one line consisting exclusively of exactand immediate iterations of a musical fragment isplaced in counterpoint with a line that avoids repetition,the latter (more novel) part tends to be perceived asmore prominent. This was reflected in a significanteffect of Registral Position, F(1, 39) ¼ 9.48, p ¼ .004,η2

p ¼ .20. A lower mean for those situations in which therepetitive part was the upper voice (M ¼ .51, SD ¼ .17),with respect to those conditions in which it was thelower voice (M ¼ .54, SD ¼ .16), indicates that theupper voice was perceived as relatively more prominentwhen the repetitive part was positioned in the lowervoice, and the lower voice was perceived as relativelymore prominent when the repetitive part was located inthe upper voice. This effect of repetition on voicesalience is a generalization, as it does not consider howthe listeners’ attention might fluctuate between the twolines over time. With respect to the temporal evolutionof the listeners’ attention, the Registral Position �Tem-poral Position interaction shows that the perceivedprominence of repetitive parts decreases over the courseof the music, whereas the perceived prominence of non-repetitive parts increases over the course of the music,F(1, 39) ¼ 14.18, p ¼ .001, η2

p ¼ .27. The mean ofperceived prominence for the excerpts in which therepetitive part was positioned in the upper voicedecreased from .52 (SD ¼ .15) in the first half of thestimuli to .50 (SD ¼ .18) in the second half, whereas themean of perceived prominence for the stimuli withlower repetitive parts increased from .53 (SD ¼ .13) to.55 (SD¼ .18). This suggests that the listeners’ attentioninitially tends to focus more naturally on the higher

voice—an idea that is supported by previous experi-mental research (Francis, 2011) and by the slight overalltendency of the participants in our study to perceive thehigher voice as more prominent (GM ¼ .52, 95% CI[.51, .54]). Attention then gradually moves towards themore novel part, independently of its relative registralposition. In other words, perceived prominence for thehigher voice increases when the repeating fragment is inthe lower part, and it decreases from a position thatindicates salience of the upper voice to a position thatcorresponds to equal prominence when the repeatingfragment is in the upper part. This interaction effectappears to be present in two-measure repetitive unitsbut not in four-measure units, as reflected in the Regis-tral Position �Temporal Position � Length interaction,F(1, 39) ¼ 7.74, p ¼ .008, η2

p ¼ .17 (Figure 2).In order to have a better understanding of the effects

of repetition on the listeners’ attention over time and toexamine the possibility that the twofold division of thestimuli in the data analysis could be averaging an effectoccurring at a specific point during the second half ofthe musical examples with four-measure repetitiveunits—hypothetically, towards the very end of thosestimuli—the mean perceived prominence was plottedevery half second (Figure 3), and a follow-up analysisconsidered four (rather than two) levels of the TemporalPosition factor (Figure 4). The four levels correspondedto the four statements of the two-measure repetitiveunits and to the first and second halves of each of thetwo presentations of the four-measure units, with thefirst measure (3s) omitted from the initial statement.The results confirmed the effects observed through theanalysis with the bisected stimuli. The Registral Position� Temporal Position interaction was significant for thetwo-measure stimuli, F(3, 39)¼ 16,14, p < .001, η2

p ¼ .29,but not for the four-measure stimuli. The pattern ofmeans showed that, in the case of two-measure units,perceived prominence of the nonrepetitive partincreased gradually and consistently from the originalpresentation of the repetitive unit to its third statement(second repetition), remaining fairly stable during thefourth (final) statement of the repetitive unit (Figure 4).Keeping in mind that the total number of repetitions ofshort repetitive units was twice that of long repetitiveunits, the exclusivity of the effect for short units suggeststhat the number of repetitions of the repetitive unit mayaffect its perceived prominence. Put differently, themore a musical segment is repeated, the less attentionlisteners pay to it. Short repetitive units were stated fourtimes, whereas long units were introduced twice. Inaddition, two-measure repetitive units were repeatedonce in the first half of the stimuli and two more times


in the second half, whereas four-measure units wererepeated only once during the second half of the exam-ples. It is thus possible that the apparent lack of theeffect for four-measure repetitive units reported heresimply reflects the fact that long units were repeatedonly once within each musical example. One repetitionis likely to be insufficient for the effect to take place.Furthermore, it is possible that listeners do not detecta repetition until a considerable section of the fragmentis restated. In the case of the stimuli with four-measurerepetitive units, then, listeners could have detected the(only) repetition when the musical examples were com-ing to an end (or even after they have concluded).Experiment 2 investigated this further.

The Registral Position � Relative Speed interactionwas significant, indicating that lines that are higher inregister and faster in speed than their concurrent lineare perceived as more salient, independently of whetherthey consist of a repeating pattern or not, and thathomorhythmically moving parts are perceived asequally prominent unless there is a repeating patternin the lower voice that drives the listener’s attention tothe upper voice; F(2, 78) ¼ 31.82, p < .001, η2

p ¼ .45(Figure 5). These findings suggest that the listeners’tendency to follow the higher part is particularly strongwhen that part is moving faster and, more importantlyfor the present study, that such a tendency disappearswhen there is a repeating pattern moving faster in thelower voice or moving slower in the higher voice. Thiseffect appears to be more pronounced in the second halfthan in the first half, as reflected in the Registral Posi-tion � Temporal Position � Relative Speed interaction,F(2, 78)¼ 11.17, p < .001, η2

p ¼ .22 (Figure 6), especially

for longer repetitive units as shown by the four-wayinteraction, F(2, 78)¼ 10.63, p < .001, η2

p ¼ .21 (Figure 7).Finally, it is important to point out that the limitations

in the composition of the musical examples that werecaused by the experimental conditions, along with an

FIGURE 2. Mean perceived voice prominence as a function of Registral Position (solid and dotted lines) and Relative Speed of the repetitive part (2-

and 4-measure units) and Temporal Position within the stimulus (first and second half). Upper Voice Repeats means a higher registral position of the

repetitive part with respect to the nonrepetitive part, and vice versa for lower voice.

FIGURE 3. Mean perceived voice prominence as a function of time for

both Registral Positions and Temporal Positions within the stimulus. The

mean perceived prominence is plotted every half second.


attempt to control for confounding effects, might havediminished the effects reported here. As repetition is anessential characteristic of tonal music from the Com-mon-Practice period, the extreme lack of repetition thatcharacterized the nonrepetitive parts might have addedan unnatural quality to them, diminishing their poten-tial to catch the attention of the listeners. Similarly, thetotally unchanging rhythmic profile (constant rhythmicvalues) of the nonrepetitive part in the stimuli featuringAlberti Bass patterns is not typical of lines accompaniedby Alberti Bass figuration representing the Common-Practice repertoire.

Experiment 2

METHOD

Participants. Twenty participants (aged 18-41 years,M ¼ 23.9 years old, SD ¼ 5.9, 10 females) completedthe experiment. One participant identified himself asa professional musician and five other participantsreported having played a musical instrument for at leastfive years. Payment, recruitment, and hearing-testingprocedures were the same as in Experiment 1.

Stimuli. The stimuli of Experiment 2 consisted of the 12musical examples with four-measure repetitive unitsfrom Experiment 1 repeated once (with the final mea-sure of the original examples stated only once at thevery end), so that the repetitive units were stated fourtimes and the original nonrepetitive part was consequentlystated twice. Based on the results from Experiment 1 forlonger repetitive units, and given that 16-measure musicalexcerpts with a voice that avoids repetition of any kindwould be unnatural for music from the Common-Practiceperiod, we concluded that stating the nonrepetitive partfrom the original stimuli twice (i.e., repeating an eight-measure unit once) should not interfere with the listener’sattention in a different way than a part that is nonrepetitivein its entirety. The stimuli of Experiment 2 were played atthe same sound level and through the same sound systemas in Experiment 1.

Procedure. The experimental procedure was identical tothat of Experiment 1.

Experimental design. The experimental design consistedof three factors: (a) Registral Position of the repetitivepart, which referred to the location of the repetitivepart—either in the lower or in the upper voice; (b) Tem-poral Position, which compared the first and second halfof each musical example; and (c) Relative Speed of therepetitive part with respect to the nonrepetitive part,which could be faster, equal or slower—the faster andslower speeds represented by 1:4 and 1:2 proportions.Compared to the main experiment, Length was removed,because the aim of the follow-up experiment was toinvestigate the effect of four-measure repetitive unitsonly. Each cell of the experimental design correspondedto one musical stimulus. A three-factor repeated-mea-sures ANOVA was conducted with average perceivedprominence as the dependent variable.

RESULTS

The results indicated a nonsignificant Registral Position� Temporal Position interaction for the musical stimuliwith four statements of the long repetitive units, F(1, 19)

FIGURE 5. Mean perceived voice prominence as a function of the

Relative Speed of the repetitive part for both Registral Positions. The

x-axis displays the speed of the repetitive part with respect to the

nonrepetitive part.

FIGURE 4. Mean perceived voice prominence as a function of the four

statements of the repetitive unit for the two Registral Positions. The x-

axis displays four equivalent divisions of the musical stimuli except for

the initial 3s.


FIGURE 6. Mean perceived voice prominence as a function of the Relative Speed of the repetitive part for both Registral Positions and Temporal

Positions.

FIGURE 7. Mean perceived voice prominence as a function of the Relative Speed of the repetitive part for both Registral Positions. The upper panels

present the results for two-measure repeating units and the lower panels for four-measure units. Left and right panels are for the first and second

halves, respectively.


< 1: over the course of the music, perceived prominenceremained constant for both the repetitive part (com-posed of 4 four-measure repetitive units) (M [1st half]¼ .53, SD ¼ .16, M [2nd half] ¼ .53, SD ¼ .18) and theless repetitive part (composed of nonrepetitive eight-measure units repeated only once) (M [1st half] ¼ .54,SD ¼ .16, M [2nd half] ¼ .55, SD ¼ .18). An analysiswith four levels of the Temporal Position factor—corre-sponding to the four statements of the repetitive unitwith the first 3s omitted from the first statement—confirmed these findings by revealing a nonsignificantRegistral Position x Temporal Position interaction, F(3,19) < 1: perceived prominence neither decreased for therepetitive parts (composed of 2 four-measure repetitiveunits) over the course of the music (M [mm. 2-4] ¼ .52,SD ¼ .14, M [mm. 5-8] ¼ .53, SD ¼ .18, M [mm. 9-12]¼ .53, SD ¼ .19, M [mm. 13-17] ¼ .52, SD ¼ .18) norincreased for the less repetitive parts (composed of non-repetitive four-measure units repeated only once) (M[mm. 2-4] ¼ .53, SD ¼ .15, M [mm. 5-8] ¼ .54, SD ¼.18, M [mm. 9-12] ¼ .55, SD ¼ .19, M [mm. 13-17] ¼.55, SD ¼ .18).

Discussion

This study presented an empirical investigation of theeffects of exact and immediate repetitions of a musicalfragment on the listener’s attention to the concurrentstreams of two-part contrapuntal passages. The resultssuggest that repetition plays an important role in theperception of the individual layers (voices, parts, orstreams) of musical textures. Specifically, the relativeperceptual prominence of the voices of a two-part con-trapuntal texture seems to be partly guided by theirrepetitive or nonrepetitive structure. When one of thetwo lines consists of immediate and exact reiterations ofa short fragment, listeners generally attend to the other,concurrent more varying line. This suggests that imme-diate and exact musical repetition can affect the waylisteners follow the different textural components ofpolyphonic music. As the repeated part does notchange, the listeners’ attention moves to other, moreattractive and novel parts. Consequently, this studysheds light on current models of the dynamics of musiclistening by illuminating the way in which attentionfluctuates between two simultaneous musical voices asthey unfold in time as a function of their repetitiveness.

Our findings indicate that this effect of repetition onthe perception of musical texture is exclusive to rela-tively short (2 measures or 6s) repetitive musical frag-ments. The incorporation of repetitive units of longerduration (4 measures or 12s) did not seem to affect the

direction of the listener’s attention to one of the twovoices of the counterpoint. Nevertheless, these resultsdo not imply that long repetitive units cannot influencethe listener’s attention to different parts of the texture. Itis possible that repetitive units longer than a given dura-tion require more than four successive statements inorder to have an effect on the listener’s attention and,consequently, on their perception of voice prominence.This could be due to the difficulties in recalling andautomatically processing longer musical fragments,a hypothesis supported by the real-time plot of thefour-measure repetitive units (top of Figure 3). Asshown, when the lower voice consists of four-measurerepeating fragments, listeners have a slight tendency todirect their attention to the nonrepetitive, upper part atthe beginning of the repetition. This brief tendency toattend to the more novel upper part during the begin-ning of the repetition of the lower part was confirmedby the analysis that divides the stimuli in four, where themean perceived prominence corresponding to the firsttwo measures (or first half) of the repetition was thehighest of the four. Notwithstanding, the differencebetween this mean and the other means did not reachstatistical significance. This last point, in tandem withthe results from Experiment 2, leads us to hypothesizethat the nonsignificant effect in Experiment 2 couldsimply reflect the possibility that 12-s units requiremore than four statements in order to have a significanteffect on the listener’s attention. Unfortunately, design-ing an experiment that would allow us to empiricallyconfirm this hypothesis has practical limitations. Fivestatements of a four-measure repetitive unit wouldrequire 20-measure musical stimuli, and musicalexcerpts containing a voice that avoids any kind of rep-etition for that long would be too distant from melodicpatterns characteristic of the Common-Practice period.Attempting to solve this problem by repeating the non-repetitive part, like we did in the follow-up experiment,has obvious restrictions; stating the less repetitive partmore than once certainly puts into question its ability tofairly represent nonrepetition.

Repetition and novelty are complementary conceptsthat have occupied a central place in the literature onmusical expectation. Each reiteration of a musical pat-tern increases the listener’s ability to predict it, espe-cially when the repeated fragment is short—as it is thecase for the two-measure repetitive units in this study.In this sense, novel musical events are less predictablethan repeated ones. This suggests that, beyond any sty-listic and contextual considerations, musical novelty ismore unexpected than musical repetition. Nevertheless,musical change can be either surprising or expected


depending on when it occurs. In the repertoire from theCommon-Practice period, musical change tends to bevery surprising when it interrupts the repetition ofa fragment, but highly expected after a few immediaterepetitions of a pattern. Following this, novel musicalevents appear to be particularly apt to play with thelistener’s expectations. Meyer (1956, Chapter I) sug-gested that musical emotion arises from interruptedexpectations. Unexpected novel musical events canarouse emotional responses by virtue of their ability toinhibit, thwart, or block ongoing listening expectations.Similarly, expected novel musical events can lead toaffective reactions by virtue of their relative lack ofspecificity.

The idea that repetition and novelty can lead to musi-cal affect by playing with a listener’s expectationsimplies a certain degree of voluntary or involuntaryattention to the musical events in question. Further-more, in music, to expect means to wait for a musicalevent to happen, which is a way of listening for orattending to that event. In this context, the link betweenmusical repetition and emotion depends on attention:attention is necessary to generate the musical expectan-cies that are essential for emotional affect. In this sense,a study of the effects of repetition on attention cancontribute to our understanding of musical emotions.Margulis (2014) has proposed that repetition contri-butes to musical pleasure in many different ways thatgo beyond expectation theory. According to Margulis,repetition creates a sense of embodiment by facilitatingthe listener’s ability to anticipate the future, activatingmotor circuitry in the brain, increasing the sense ofmusical involvement, and inviting an overt or virtualcommunal participation. Based on the findings fromthe present study and on Margulis’s description of therelationship between involvement and musical emotion,we would like to suggest that repetition could contributeto pleasure in music by facilitating the discovery of new

musical features and paths during the listening experi-ence, consequently leading to greater involvement andbetter acquaintance with the music. Our results are con-sistent with the notion that repetition—ubiquitous tomany experiential domains—leads to automatization,allowing attention to be focused elsewhere. If musicalrepetition can be processed automatically, it is likely thatit would enhance the listener’s ability to attend to musi-cal events that would otherwise remain unexplored dueto the difficulties in dividing attention among simulta-neous lines during music listening. Accordingly,through its effect on the perceived prominence of simul-taneous musical parts, repetition reveals to the listenerthe many corners and curves that refine the uniquemultidimensional beauty of music.

Author Note

This research was supported by a doctoral scholarshipfrom the Fonds de recherche du Quebec-Societe et cul-ture awarded to CT and a Canada Research Chair anda grant from the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engi-neering Research Council (RGPIN 312774-2010)awarded to SMc. Portions of this research were pre-sented at the CIRMMT Music Perception and Cogni-tion Student Colloquium Series, McGill University,September 2013; the Milestones in Music CognitionSymposium, McGill University, July 2014; the Interna-tional Conference on Music Perception and Cognition,Seoul, August 2014. We are very grateful to Bennett K.Smith for programming the experiments and assistingwith technical difficulties.

Correspondence concerning this article should beaddressed to Cecilia Taher, Schulich School of Music,McGill University, 555 Sherbrooke Street West,H3A1E3, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

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