RESEARCH ARTICLE An Attentional Effect of Musical Metrical Structure

Theories of metrical structure postulate the existence of several degrees of beat strength. While previous work has clearly established that humans are sensitive to the distinction between strong beats and weak ones, there is little evidence for a more fine grained distinc-tion between intermediate levels. Here, we present experimental data showing that atten-tion can be allocated to an intermediate level of beat strength. Comparing the effects of short exposures to 6/8 and 3/4 metrical structures on a tone detection task, we observe that subjects respond differently to beats of intermediate strength than to weak beats. Metrical structure and attention According to music theory, isochronous (or near-isochronous) musical pieces possess a metri-cal structure which can be described by a grid indicating the relative prominence associated with various equally-spaced points in time, or beats [1]. Each beat on the horizontal axis is associated with some level of abstract prominence, indicated by the number of dots on the ver-tical axis. For example, Fig 1 shows the grid notation of a very frequent metrical pattern, known as common time or