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Temporal multi-scale considerations in the modeling of tonal cognition from continuous rating experiments

Title Temporal multi-scale considerations in the modeling of tonal cognition from continuous rating experiments
Publication Type Conference Paper
Year of Publication 2012
Conference Name International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition
Authors Martorell, A. , Toiviainen P. , & Gómez E.
Conference Location Thessaloniki (Greece)
Abstract Modeling tonal induction dynamics from naturalistic music stimuli usually involves slide-windowing the stimuli in analysis frames or leaky memory processing. In both cases, the appropriate selection of the time-scale or decay constant is critical, although rarely discussed in a systematic way. This study shows the qualitative and quantitative impact that time-scale has in the evaluation of a simple tonal induction model, when the concurrent probe-tone method is used to capture continuous ratings of perceived relative stability of pitch-classes. Music stimulus is slide-windowed using many timescales, ranging from fractions of second to the whole musical piece. Each frame is analysed to obtain a pitch-class profile and, for each temporal scale, the time series is compared with the empirical annotations. Two commonly used frame-to-frame metrics are tested: a) Correlation between the 12-D vectors from ratings and model. b) Correlation between the 24 key activation strengths, obtained by correlation of the 12-D vectors with the Krumhansl and Kessler's key profiles. We discuss the metric artifacts introduced by the second representation, and we show that the best performing timescale, minimizing the root mean-square of the frame-to-frame distances along time, is far longer than short-time memory conventions. We propose a temporal multi-scale analysis method as an interactive tool for exploring the effect of time-scale and different multidimensional representations in tonal cognition modeling.