Tapping to ragtime: Cues to pulse finding

Two experiments investigated cues to pulse finding using a relatively uncon strained, naturalistic paradigm. Participants tapped what they felt was a c omfortable pulse on a keyboard playing a percussive sound. The stimulus mat erials were based on ragtime excerpts, played metronomically (i.e., without expressive timing or tempo variation). The first experiment, with 8 musica lly experienced and 8 musically inexperienced subjects, played each excerpt in two versions: a pitch-varied version (the original excerpt) and a monot onic version (with all tones changed to middle C) that was designed to remo ve all melodic and harmonic cues to pulse. Neither the absence of pitch inf ormation nor musical experience significantly affected performance. The sec ond experiment tested 12 musically experienced subjects on shorter excerpts from the same ragtime pieces. Full (right-hand and left-hand parts togethe r) and right-hand-only versions of the excerpts were each played in pitch-v aried and monotonic versions. Removing the left-hand part significantly aff ected tapping performance on a number of measures, causing a lower percenta ge of tapping on the downbeat, more off-beat taps, more aperiodic taps, mor e switches between tapping modes, a higher variability of the intertap inte rval, and larger deviations from the beat. As a whole, these indicate a neg ative effect of removing the left-hand part. Again, differences between pit ch-varied and monotonic versions were generally small. Analysis of the musi c revealed the following cues to pulse finding: a predictable alternating b ass pattern in the left-hand part and a majority of notes on metrically str ong positions in both the right-hand and left-hand parts. These results sug gest that, for piano ragtime music, temporal cues are prominently available for finding and following the pulse and that pulse finding is largely inde pendent of pitch information. Implications of the experimental measures and music-analytic techniques for models of pulse perception are considered.