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  4. Hierarchical syntactic structure predicts listeners’ sequence completion in music
 
conference paper

Hierarchical syntactic structure predicts listeners’ sequence completion in music

Herff, Steffen A.  
•
Harasim, Daniel  
•
Cecchetti, Gabriele  
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July 26, 2021
Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference. Vol 43
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studies in psycho-linguistics have provided compelling evidence that theoretical syntactic structures have cognitive correlates that inform and influence language perception. Generative grammar models also present a principled way to represent a plethora of hierarchical structures outside the domain of language. Hierarchical aspects of musical structure, in particular, are often described through grammar models. Whether such models carry perceptual relevance in music, however, requires further study. To address the descriptive adequacy of a grammar model in music, unfamiliar musical phrases consisting of chord progressions within the Jazz idiom were used, and zero to three chords were cut from the end of each phrase. A total of 150 participants were then presented with these stimuli and asked to provide a Closure Response, that is to predict how many more chords (0, 1, 2, or 3) were expected before the chord progression was complete. Simultaneously, a grammar model of hierarchical structure as well as a bigram model were trained over a corpus of 150 expert-annotated Jazz tunes. The models were then used to estimate probability distributions of Closure Responses in the stimuli presented to the participants. Bayesian mixed-effects models reveal that the models carry predictive value for the participants' response distributions and that the hierarchical model contains incremental predictive information over the bigram model. The present results suggest that -- akin to language -- hierarchical relationships between musical events have a cognitive correlate, which influences the perception and interpretation of music.

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Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Herff, Steffen A.  
Harasim, Daniel  
Cecchetti, Gabriele  
Finkensiep, Christoph  
Rohrmeier, Martin Alois  
Date Issued

2021-07-26

Published in
Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference. Vol 43
Start page

903

End page

909

URL

See on publisher's site

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w44g4x1

Link to the project

https://osf.io/9wjyg/
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DCML  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Vienna, Austria

July 26-29th, 2021

Available on Infoscience
December 20, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/184008
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