Meter without rhythmic pattern repetitions increases pre-attentive processing

Abstract

Processing musical meter—the organization of time into regular cycles of strong and weak beats—requires abstraction from the varying rhythmic surface. Several studies have investigated whether meter processing requires attention, or if it can be both pre-attentive and attentive. While findings on temporal expectation (processing meter per se) indicate benefits of attention, studies on meter processing in complex, dual-task contexts (meter used for temporal orientation) consistently report pre-attentive processing. Also, while surface-based approaches to meter (meter aided by pattern repetition) show some benefits of attention, structural approaches (meter not aided by pattern repetition, increased complexity) find pre-attentive-only processing. Therefore, in the present study, we hypothesized that pre-attentive processing increases with cognitive load, and we compared surface with structural meter processing. Supporting our hypothesis, we saw improved behavioral performance for surface meter, as well as electroencephalogram (EEG) evidence that structural meter elicits pre-attentive processing while surface meter does not. Our findings highlight the need for increased awareness in approaches to meter processing and support the idea that increased cognitive demand may recruit pre-attentive processing of temporal structure. At the practical level, our findings suggest that focusing listeners’ attention on meter, for example, when practicing dance, may not increase their understanding of meter structure.