Perception of Rhythmic Similarity in Reich’s Clapping Music: Factors and Models

Background An essential aspect of music is that it unfolds over time. Thus, understanding the perception and processing of the temporal organization of musical events (rhythm and metre) is critical to understanding music cognition and perception. The perception of similarity has been used as a measure of the underlying processing of categories of stimuli. There are various approaches and theories accounting for the perception of similarity including feature-based (Tversky, 1977), geometric (Shepard, 1987), and transformational (Chater and Vitanyi, 2003). Regarding music cognition, the perception of similarity has been used in research on the perception of melody (Eerola, et al., 2001) and computational approaches (Müllensiefen and Frieler, 2004), however very little work has investigated the perception of rhythmic similarity specifically. Information theoretic approaches to music cognition can use computational models of the statistical properties of music to predict perception and neural responses to music (e.g. Pearce, et al., 2010), and provide information-processing models of the perceptual similarity between objects, based on how predictable an event is given the statistical properties of other events, or the information required to transform one stimulus configuration to another. These are consistent with an approach to music cognition that gives the statistical properties of musical events a central role, along with their effects on expectation, predictability, and emotional responses (e.g. Huron, 2006).