The perception of structural boundaries in polyphonic representations of Western popular music

This study presents two experiments on the perception of structural boundaries in Western popular music. In the first experiment, subjects segmented two polyphonic representations of six different songs. In the second experiment, subjects rated the salience of boundaries selected from the first experiment and indicated which musical cues were responsible for the boundaries. The overall frequency of boundary indications was highly correlated with the mean salience rating, suggesting that the number of boundary indications across subjects is a good measure of boundary salience. The strongest cues for boundaries indicated by subjects were harmonic-progression, rhythm-changes, timbre-changes, and tempo-changes. Furthermore, boundary indications and their salience ratings were compared with those from a previous study in which monophonic representations of the same songs had been used (Bruderer, McKinney, & Kohlrausch, 2009). Results show that the segment boundaries are perceived at similar time instances and their strengths are highly correlated across the three representations.