The perception of structural stability in atonal music: The influence of salience, stability, horizontal motion, pitch commonality, and dissonance

Two experiments that investigate the perception of structural stability in atonal music are reported. The first experiment suggests that listeners may hear atonal music in terms of the relative structural importance of events and that listeners' hearing is greatly influenced by metrical and duration al structure. A second experiment reveals that, even in the absence of clea r rhythmic, timbral, dynamic, and motivic information, listeners infer rela tionships of relative structural stability between events at the musical su rface. The effects of three main variables (pitch commonality, horizontal m ovement, and dissonance) and two salience criteria (register and parallelis m) are considered. The results indicate that in the absence of a clearly di fferentiated surface structure, listeners' judgments of stability are influ enced by the dissonance of chords and the horizontal movement of voices. It is concluded that salience (phenomenal accents), voice-leading, and disson ance are potentially important factors in the abstraction of relationships of relative structural importance, and hence to any inference of prolongati onal structure in atonal music.