Annotation for Drake, Carolyn, Dowling, W. Jay, and Palmer, Caroline

Accent Structures in the Reproduction of Simple Tunes by Children and Adult Pianists

Annotation (by Bill Tilghman):

The authors theorize that in order to make sense of the complex juxtaposition of sounds that makes up most music, listeners segment the music into smaller, simpler units, and that they use accent as one means of accomplishing this segmentation. The authors further assert that accents may function in different ways, depending on the specific musical elements that give rise to the accent. For the purposes of their study, they define three types of accent: metric accent, arising from regular patterns of dynamic intensification; rhythmic grouping accent, accruing to the notes immediately preceding and following a long duration or pause; and melodic accent, arising from melodic leap or change of direction. (It should be noted that the authors' metric accent would be described by many theorists as merely a "stress" accent. It is referred to here as "metric" because in the melodies devised for this study these accents are regularly recurring, but rhythmic grouping and melodic accents are often regularly recurring as well, and the authors ignore some other potential sources of meter in their melodies, such as implied harmonic structure.) The primary hypothesis is that melodies are most efficiently learned, and therefore most effectively reproduced, when all three types of accents coincide, since segmentation is easiest under these conditions.
The authors devised four brief "themes," in which all three types of accent coincide, and four "variations" on each of these themes, in which one or all of the accent types are placed in confict with the others. Groups of 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children and a group of university piano students were asked to reproduce these melodies by tapping rhythms, singing, and/or playing, and their performances were evaluated for accuracy. In all of the groups of subjects, the rhythms of the themes were reproduced no better than those of the variations, indicating that the perception of the temporal structure of a melody is relatively unaffected by accent synchrony. But the pitches of the themes were in most cases reproduced significantly better than those of the variaions, indicating that pitches are perceived most readily when different types of accent reinforce each other. The one exception to this involves the authors' "metric" accent, the accent arising from dynamic stress, whose displacement from other types of accent seems to have little effect on the perception of the pitch structure.
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