NEW MODEL, OLD PROBLEM: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION INTO GROUPING AND METRICAL CONSTRAINTS IN MUSIC PERCEPTION NEW MODEL, OLD PROBLEM: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION INTO GROUPING AND METRICAL CONSTRAINTS IN MUSIC PERCEPTION Mihailo Antovic Department of English, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Nis, Serbia CONCLUSIONS: 1. Musicians much better in absolute figures (as expected). 2. Grouping constraint rankings differ in musicians and nonmusicians (contradicts previous research). 3. Metrical constraint rankings are almost identical in musicians and nonmusicians (a new finding?). Are metrical inferences relatively uniform irrespective of musical training? 4. Preference rules/violable constraints seem to be a good tool in studying some aspects of music perception. BACKGROUND: Metrical and grouping preference rules from GTTM (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983) have been recently revived in musicolinguistics through the computational model known as Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). While there have been studies on the psychological reality of grouping preferences (Deliege 1987, van der Werf and Hendriks 2004, Frankland and Cohen 2004), metrical structure has not been studied yet via preference rules/violable constraints. SAMPLE: 120 randomly selected undergraduate students of the University of Nis, Serbia, classified into four strata: 30 students of music, 30 students of technical sciences, 30 students of natural sciences, 30 students of social sciences and humanities. RESULTS: Grouping structure 1.Constraints are ranked in the sample as follows (N=120): HARMONY>ARTICULATION>DYNAMICS>> TIMBRE>REGISTER>LENGTH. Differences between adjacent choices are below statistical significance. 2. For the whole population, the first three constraints from the list are clearly of stronger influence than the second three (p=0.005) 3. Musicians and nonmusicians have markedly different constraint rankings. Musicians (N=30) ARTICULATION>HARMONY>TIMBRE> DYNAMICS>LENGTH>REGISTER (p=0.302!) Nonmusicians (N=90) HARMONY>DYNAMICS>ARTICULATION TIMBRE>INTERVAL>LENGTH (p=0.026) 4. Refusal to parse was rare (1.53% - accorded with the OT principle that constraints always work); single-element groups were relatively common (4+1 – 22.2%, 1+4 – 17.08% - challenging GPR1 from GTTM, which proposes that such groups should be strongly avoided). AIM: 1. To test empirically whether some grouping and metrical constraints (GPR3, MPR5), as proposed in GTTM, indeed influence parsing choices. 2. To investigate if there are any differences in the parsing choices of musicians and nonmusicians. Language and Music as Cognitive Systems May 2007 PROCEDURE: The participants were faced with a total of 24 randomly ordered suggestive and nonsuggestive melodic and metrical stimuli composed specifically for this purpose. Their task was to divide the five-tone melodic segments into two groups on a separate piece of paper with simplified notation, and press a button when certain they had heard a stressed beat in a 100bpm metrical structure. EXAMPLES OF STIMULI: Grouping structure Metrical structure GRP3a A larger interval marks the parsing spot GPR3d Harmonic background marks the parsing spot MPR5a A longer note marks the stressed beat MPR5d Harmonic background marks the stressed beat nonsugestive stimuli suggestive stimuli nonsugestive stimuli (accorded with expectancies) suggestive stimuli (not accorded with expectancies) Metrical structure 1.Constraints are ranked in the sample as follows (N=120): DYNAMIC>HARMONY>>SLUR>PITCH EVENT>>LENGTH>>ARTICULATION Differences between adjacent choices are below statistical significance. 2. Three groups of constraints seem to be clearly delineated for the entire population. We labelled them as follows: PHYSICAL STRESS >> MELODIC STRESS >> ORNAMENTAL STRESS (CI=95%, p<0.05) 3. Musicians and nonmusicians have surprisingly similar constraint rankings. Musicians (N=30) HARMONY>DYNAMIC>SLUR>PITCH EVENT>LENGTH>ARTICULATION (CI<<95%!) Nonmusicians (N=90) DYNAMIC>HARMONY>SLUR>PITCH EVENT>LENGTH>ARTICULATION (CI=95%, p<0.05) 4. In all pairs of stimuli but one, response times were delayed in suggestive examples (those contradicting parsers’ expectancies), proving once again that expectancy is a realistic phenomenon in music cognition.