TRACKING MUSICAL PATTERNS USING JOINT ACCENT STRUCTURE

Joint Accent Structure (JAS) is a construct that uses temporal relatio nships between different accents in a melodic pattern as indices of it s complexity. Concordant patterns are ones in which the periodic recur rence of melodic accents form simple ratios with the period of tempora l accents (e.g., 1:1, 1:2), whereas Discordant patterns have periods o f melodic and temporal accents with a more complex accent period ratio (e.g., 3:2). Participants were told to selectively attend to and sync hronize finger taps with accents in two experiments that examined atte ntional tracking to musical patterns having a ''concordant'' or ''disc ordant'' JAS. Results indicated that tapping was more variable with di scordant than with concordant JAS patterns, both with respect to produ ced inter-accent time periods and with respect to the phase of taps re lative to accent onsets. These findings are interpreted in terms of re al time attending and its control by event time structure.