Rhythm and Pitch in Music

Rhythm and pitch are the 2 primary dimensions of music. They are interesting psychologically because simple, well-defined units combine to form highly complex and varied patterns. This article brings together the major developments in research on how these dimensions are perceived and remembered, beginning with psychophysical results on time and pitch perception. Progressively larger units are considered, moving from basic psychological categories of temporal and frequency ratios, to pulse and scale, to metrical and tonal hierarchies, to the formation of musical rhythms and melodies, and finally to the cognitive representation of large-scale musical form. Interactions between the dimensions are considered, and major theoretical proposals are described. The article identifies various links between musical structure and perceptual and cognitive processes, suggesting psychological influences on how sounds are patterned in music. Music perception has a long and distinguished history as a topic of psychological investigation. It has been considered within vir- tually every major theoretical framework of psychology and stud- ied with diverse methodologies. Insights about music perception have come from approaches as wideranging as psychophysics, Gestalt psychology, information processing and cognition, the psychology of emotions, and neuroscience. Psychological interest in music has intensified significantly in the last few decades, as has interest in music by other disciplines such as computer science, linguistics, sociology, biology, and philosophy. At the same time, the specialties traditionally concerned with music--musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, and music education--have shown an increased concern with understanding the psychological processes underlying musical behaviors. The motivation for this article is to summarize the currently available psychological liter- ature on two well-developed areas of music perception and cog- nition research. It focuses specifically on musical rhythm and pitch, which are the primary dimensions of most musical styles. These are interesting psychologically because highly complex and varied patterns are formed from simple, well-defined units. The major impetus for recent psychological research on music is cognitive psychology, which emphasizes the influence of knowl- edge on perception. According to this approach, a presented stim- ulus is interpreted by knowledge, sometimes called schemas, ac- quired through prior experience. In music, the schemas include, for example, typical rhythmic and pitch patterns. Perceptual informa- tion is assimilated to these, facilitating the organization of the sounded events into patterns and generating expectations for future events. Cognitive processing can also lead to systematic distortions so that the events may not be encoded and remembered exactly. Inherent constraints, such as short-term memory limits and biases I am grateful to Eric Clarke, Alf Gabrielsson, and John Sloboda for comments on an earlier version of this article, and to Lynn Robertson and Stephen Handel for suggestions for revision. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Carol L. Krumhansl, Department of Psychology, Lids Hall, Comell University, Ithaca, New York 14853. Electronic mail may be sent to clk4@comeU.edu. toward simple patterns, are also presumed to play a role. The knowledge that is invoked during listening depends on the larger context, encouraging the study of more musically realistic stimulus materials. The emphasis on cognition also encourages the study of how musical knowledge is acquired. This topic is beyond the present scope, but it is important to note that three different approaches to this question are available in the context of music. The first is the developmental approach, and a growing body of research on this topic is uncovering an early predisposition for music processing in infants and children. The second approach is to look at effects of musical training. In this connection, two types of training should be distinguished: (a) instruction on instrument or voice and (b) academic training in music theory, analysis, composition, and history. Psychological studies on musical questions tend to use amateur musicians whose knowledge is derived primarily from learning to play music rather than from extensive academic study. The third approach is to vary familiarity with the musical style. This can be done, for example, by using contemporary art music or music from other cultures and/or comparing the results for subjects with different cultural backgrounds. Such comparisons are impor- tant for testing the generality of results, but most investigations take Western art music of the last few centuries (tonal-harmonic music) as the musical point of reference, as is done here. This article consists of two sections, one on rhythm and the other on pitch. They follow the same organization in order to highlight parallels between these topics. Each section progresses from psychophysical results to high-level cognitive processes. The elements of rhythm and pitch each fall on a single underlying physical dimension--duration in the case of rhythm and frequency of vibration in the case of pitch. Each section begins with psycho- logical results on basic perceptual capacities and limitations. These results typically come from experiments using brief, abstract stim- ulus materials. Listeners are highly sensitive to small differences on these dimensions. That is, they can discriminate reliably small differences in duration and pitch. The values used in music are considerably larger than the discrimination thresholds and can be related to an underlying grid. For rhythm, this grid is the regular periodic pulse of the meter. For melody and harmony, it is the 159