Does order matter? Harmonic priming effects for scrambled tonal chord sequences.
David R. W. Sears, Jonathan E. Verbeten, Hannah Percival
Abstract
-gram) model trained on a corpus of chord annotations and then identified the scrambled versions (scrambling chords 2-8) that produced high estimates of model surprisal. In both experiments, 60 participants (30 musicians) indicated as quickly as possible whether the target chord was in or out of tune, where out-of-tune trials were either fixed at a tuning level of 40 cents sharp relative to the preceding context (Experiment 1), or at a tuning level representing the intonation discrimination threshold of each participant, which was estimated using an adaptive staircasing procedure before the main session began (Experiment 2). Correct response times and sensitivity measures replicated the high-to-low staircase found in the model estimates, suggesting harmonic priming effects reflect the order of chords in a sequence. Implications for topological and temporal models of tonal-harmonic structure are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).