Expressive timing in non-expert musical production

Abstract

It is well established that musicians deviate substantially from regular timing in music performance, and numerous studies have sought to characterize the origin of different expressive deviations. However, this work has thus far been limited by the necessity of analyzing renditions produced by highly-trained adult musicians, which precludes the opportunity to ask questions about how development and formal experience might affect expressive timing. In the present dissertation, I introduce a new paradigm for examining musical production in non-expert participants, the musical dwell time paradigm. In Chapters 2 and 3, I show that musically untrained adults and children as young as three years pause on phrase-final chords when self-pacing through chord sequences, mirroring the phenomenon of phrase-final lengthening that has been reported in expert music performance. I additionally demonstrate that by four years of age, this lengthening can be elicited by harmonic cues when other cues to phrase boundaries (metrical regularity and melodic contour) are controlled for. In Chapter 4, I show that when communicating different emotions through music, nonmusicians use expressive cues in a way that is highly consistent with expert musicians, and that there is striking similarity across participants despite a wide range of musical training. Finally, in Chapter 5, I demonstrate that children as young as 5 years olds’ performances mirror adults’ in their use of timing and loudness cues, and that their renditions become more adult-like by 7 years. Altogether, these findings corroborate previous claims that musically untrained adults are “listening experts” with substantial musical knowledge, extend these results to show that in performance musically untrained adults use timing and loudness similarly as expert musicians to delineate phrases and express emotions, and show that some elements are in place by early childhood. Overall, the musical dwell time paradigm offers a new, highly flexible method for examining musical production in participants with a wide variety of musical training.