Refinement of metre perception - training increases hierarchical metre processing

Abstract

Auditory metre perception refers to the ability to extract a temporally regular pulse and an underlying hierarchical structure of perceptual accents from a sequence of tones. Pulse perception is widely present in humans, and can be measured by the temporal expectancy for prospective tones, which listeners generate when presented with a metrical rhythm. We tested whether musical expertise leads to an increased perception and representation of the hierarchical structure of a metrical rhythm. Musicians and musical novices were tested in Show more