Temporal Structures in Tonal and Atonal Music

In Western music, tonal structure – the relative importance of different musical pitches and chords – is a key characteristic that creates tension and resolution, thus evoking musical emotions. The implicit recognition of tonal structure requires music to be parsed and integrated over time. While there is evidence for a specialized system analyzing temporal structure in speech3, this remains less well understood for music. The overarching goal of this study is to determine the characteristics of temporal integration windows for analyzing tonal and non-tonal musical structure via online behavioral experiments. We control the temporal extent of musical structure via a sophisticated scrambling algorithm in different musical styles (Western tonal music vs. 12-tone atonal music) in order to dissociate tonal temporal processes from non-tonal temporal processes.