Melodic accent: Experiments and a tentative model

Joseph M. Thomassen
1982 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America  
The perception of accent in tone sequences is a constructive process in which physical cues are matched against anticipated accents. The anticipation of the observer can experimentally be controlled by embedding the short tone sequence to be investigated in a context with a meter: method of controlled anticipation. An investigation of melodic accentuation, resulting from the succession of frequency intervals, revealed that in principle every change of frequency level between two successive
more » ... can be interpreted as accentuation of the terminal tone of the change. The melodic contour seems to be most important. The first of two intervals in opposite directions operates as the strongest accentuation, whereas two intervals in the same direction are equally effective. The effect of relative magnitude is less pronounced. Only in the case of clearly diverging relative magnitudes the largest interval is the most powerful, particularly when the intervals are in the same direction. The advantage of rises over falls is almost negligible. The short-term influence of physical factors on momentary accent perception allows for a description in terms of a "memory window" sliding along the tone sequence. At each moment the frequencies within the window provide the physical cue for accent that has to be matched against anticipation. If the span of the window is minimal, i.e., three tones, accent perception in sequences of four tones, embedded according to the method of controlled anticipation, has been accounted for fairly well, the correlation coefficient between predictions and outcomes being 0.76. PACS numbers: 43.75.Bc, 43.66.Mk 1596
doi:10.1121/1.387814 fatcat:32tkx4nmlffynjb2xfnmnhl4pa