Complexity judgments as a measure of event salience in musical rhythms
Olivia Ladinig, Henkjan Honing

Abstract:
This study investigates potential differences between musicians and
non-musicians in their perception of meter. Listeners with a variety
of musical backgrounds were asked to judge the complexity of rhythms
with 4/4 time signature in a Web-based perception experiment (N = 101).
The complexity judgments were used to derive salience values for each
position in the rhythms. Both groups showed very similar judgments
regarding the influence of the levels of metrical (hierarchical)
processing. Further, both groups displayed an influence of the
absolute position of an event in a bar (serial position
effect). Listeners in both groups perceived a rhythm as more complex
when syncopation occurred on an early beat of a bar than when
syncopation occurred on the last beat (primacy effect). This primacy
effect could be observed on the subbeat level as well, and
additionally, a rise in salience for events at the end of a bar was
found (recency effect). We propose to update the Longuet-Higgins model
of syncopation with these empirically derived values.