Perception of Arpeggiated Chord Progressions

Abstract

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The nature of the representation that listeners form of the underlying harmony of a tone sequence was investigated in 4 experiments. Stimuli were tone sequences consisting of consecutive groups of three tones each forming an arpeggiated triad. In Experiments 1 and 2, listeners rated the musical logic of 6-tone sequences with different triad combinations. It was found that ratings were affected by the usualness of the chord successions. To investigate whether longer sequences of chord changes are incorporated in the mental representation, in Experiment 3 listeners rated 9-tone sequences implying 2 successive chord changes. Both chord changes affected the ratings, the second chord change having a stronger influence than the first. Experiment 4 investigated how the progression representation develops over time, by presenting 15-tone sequences as increasing initial fragments of 9, 12 and 15 tones. For each fragment listeners 1) rated its musical logic, 2) searched the first tone of an imagined continuation, and 3) indicated whether that tone was a suitable ending tone. The ratings confirmed the earlier results, and furthermore the continuation tones appeared to be members of the expected chord. The findings support the hypothesis that listeners included the underlying harmonic structure in their representation of a tone sequence.

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