Annotation for Parncutt, Richard
The Perception of Pulse in Musical Rhythm
Annotation (by Bill Tilghman):
- Parncutt presents a theory explaining how configurations of
events give rise to pulse and meter. He believes that the
experience of musical pulse (the "pulse percept") arises from the
perception of equally-spaced salient events, having its origins
in the sounds of heartbeats and footsteps as heard by the unborn
child. A single rhythmic sequence may evoke a number of
simultaneous pulse patterns, so Parncutt briefly outlines an
algorithm that predicts the relative salience of these patterns.
Meter arises from the simultaneous perception of two or more
compatible pulses, and the salience of a meter percept can be
estimated by adding together the saliences of all of the
component pulse percepts. If there is more than one possible
combination of compatible pulse percepts, then there will be two
or more simultaneous meter percepts, but these meter percepts
will likely vary in salience (unless the meter is highly
ambiguous). Parncutt closes by suggesting that in performance
tempo is usually slightly slower near salient events than it is
between events or near rhythmically weaker events, which explains
the slight fluctuations in performence timing that have been
observed to correlate with metric placement.
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