Sabbatical Research Prospectus
Justin London, 2010-2011 Academic Year 

Whenever we begin listening to a piece of music, two things immediately happen: we start to move with the music, and we have a keen sense of how fast the music is moving. How do we do this? And especially, what is it about the music that gives us such a clear sense of its speed?

One might be tempted to think that our sense of musical speed (or tempo, to use the musical term) is simply a matter of the beat rate, as musicians, armed with their metronomes, often talk about tempo in terms of “120 quarter notes per minute.” But there is more to our sense of tempo than finding the rate at which we count or tap our feet. Not that beat finding is a trivial process—far from it, as burgeoning literature on pulse finding will attest—but finding the beat is not equivalent to finding the tempo. Drake, Gros, and Penel (1999), in their article “How Fast is That Music?” (which inspired the title for this project) show the problems involved in making simple associations between the rate at which one taps to a beat and our perceived tempo. Tempo is an “emergent property” of the music, “the result of several complex, interacting perceptual and cognitive processes” (p. 201). As David Epstein aptly put it:

Tempo is a consequence of the sum of all factors within a piece--the overall sense of a work’s themes, rhythms, articulations, ‘breathing,’ motion, harmonic progressions, tonal movement, contrapuntal activity. . . Tempo . . . is a reduction of this complex Gestalt into the element of speed per se, a speed that allows the overall, integrated bundle of musical elements to flow with a rightful sense (Epstein 1995, p. 99).

To make a judgment of musical tempo we must grasp a sense “virtual velocity” of the tones of a melody, the sense that as we move from tone to tone we traverse some distance across musical space, in a certain span of musical time. In other words, we must study the interaction(s) between pitch and time—between melodic intervals and the pattern of durations from pitch onset to pitch onset.

Research Plan

Our goal is to unpack Epstein’s “complex gestalt” through a systematic manipulation of beat rate, melodic interval structure and rhythmic organization to see how these factors give rise to a sense of time and a sense of distance and hence our impression of musical speed. The first round our experiments has been completed; preliminary results and analysis were presented at the biannual meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition in August of 2009. Using simple drum patterns as stimuli, we found that the rate of surface activity, and not the beat rate, was the most salient cue for relative speed. This was true even when listeners would tap along to the beat as they listened (a PDF version of this paper, with details of design, method, and results can be found at www.people.carleton.edu/~jlondon/).

Having established the baseline tempo characteristics of simple rhythmic patterns, the next step will be to study their interaction with melodic structure. This will involve carefully composed melodic stimuli, based upon the drum patterns used in the first stage. This will allow us to probe the interactions between melodic intervals, direction, rate of surface activity, beat rate, and metrical depth. Multivariate analysis will allow us to quantify the interaction between rhythmic and melodic parameters, as well as their relative salience.

In the third stage of experiments we move from artificial to real-world musical stimuli, using samples from a wide range of repertoires. In this stage we will ask listeners to make categorizations of the tempo, both in absolute terms and by relative ranking. Based on the results of stage two, we will be able to form and test hypotheses as to how participants will judge the tempo of these examples based on their structural characteristics.

Project Details

This project will be a renewal the research collaboration between Prof. London and Dr. Ian Cross, director of the Centre for Music and Science (CMS) at the University of Cambridge. Their previous research, carried out under the auspices of Dr. London’s Fulbright UK Distinguished Scholars Lecturing/Research Grant (2005-2006), studied of the effect of tempo on the accentual structure of melodies, with their results published in Music Perception (2009) and reported at numerous conferences. The current project calls for Prof. London to be in residence in Cambridge for all or portions of the 2010-11 academic year. The project will also benefit from the recent arrivals of Nicholas Cook and John Rink and their AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice project to the Faculty of Music at Cambridge. The CMS is an ideal place to conduct this research, as it has the facilities for conducting the experimental trials and performing the data analysis. More important, the established research community at the CMS will enhance our collaborative activities through ongoing interactions with faculty, students, and staff (for more information see: http://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/~CMS/).

Research Benefits

This study of the nature of musical tempo will give us a better understanding of the workings of both music and the mind. It will marry controlled experimental approaches, with their careful manipulation of the elements of a musical stimulus, to our natural responses to music in the real world, where both melody and rhythm are more variegated and less predictable.

This research will benefit scientists, music scholars, and musicians in a variety of ways. It will add to our growing body of knowledge of musical psychology as well as more basic aspects of auditory and temporal perception. A better understanding of the cues for movement and speed in the “virtual space” of music will have implications for studies of movement and speed in vision. Likewise, the data we gather will be of interest for neurobiological studies of pitch and rhythm processing and for researchers in human movement science. For composers and musicians, a better understanding of how and why different musical passages give rise to different senses of movement can enhance their awareness of and approaches to the compositional and interpretive choices they must make. For music theorists it will provide a firmer basis for our understanding of how rhythmic structure can affect the very fabric of melody and harmony.

Most generally, in teasing apart the ways in which melodic and harmonic elements combine, and in their combination both “move” and move us, this project will deepen our understanding of how music is able to produce its wondrous and expressive effects.

Works Cited

Drake, C., Gros, L., & A. Penel. (1999). How Fast is That Music? The relation between physical and perceived tempo. In Music, Mind, and Science, ed. S. W. Yi. Seoul, Seoul National University: 190-203.

Epstein, D. (1995). Shaping Time: Music, the Brain, and Performance. New York, Schirmer.

London, J., Himberg, T., & Cross, I. (2009). Structural and Performance Factors in the Perception of Anacruses. Music Perception (in Press).

London, J. (2004). Hearing in Time. New York, Oxford University Press.

London, J. (2001). Rhythm. In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Revised Edition, ed. J. Tyrell and S. Sadie. Oxford University Press, vol.21: 277-309.