Tracking musical patterns using joint accent structure

Joint Accent Structure (JAS) is a construct that uses temporal relationships between different accents in a melodic pattern as indices of its complexity. Concordant patterns are ones in which the periodic recurrence of melodic accents form simple ratios with the period of temporal accents (e.g., 1:1, 1:2), whereas Discordant patterns have periods of melodic and temporal accents with a more complex accent period ratio (e.g., 3:2). Participants were told to selectively attend to and synchronize finger taps with accents in two experiments that examined attentional tracking to musical patterns having a "concordant" or "discordant" JAS. Results indicated that tapping was more variable with discordant than with concordant JAS patterns, both with respect to produced inter-accent time periods and with respect to the phase of taps relative to accent onsets. These findings are interpreted in terms of real time attending and its control by event time structure.