Segmenting Arabic modal improvisation: Comparing listeners’ responses with computer predictions

Background in cognitive ethnomusicology. Arabic music theory can benefit from new perspectives on music understanding offered by psychological and cognitive research. In particular the perception of musical structure may be explained with the help of Gestalt theory, or other theories of music segmentation and hierarchy (for instance, Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 1983). Particular questions relate to the articulation between culture and nature in music understanding and to the importance of temporal apprehension of music (Imberty, 1981). These questions can be investigated by studying how listeners from different cultures segment improvised music, guided in particular by modal transitions, modal resolutions (Bigand, 1993), and how they progressively construct in parallel a global music meaning. One particular subject of investigation deals with the cognitive processes enabling the recognition of segmentation marks and temporal integration (Ayari, 2003).