Abstract
The time course of chord priming was explored in four experiments. In chord priming, a chord (a typical combination of simultaneously sounded tones) primes other chords that are musically related. In the present study, the prime duration and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the prime chord and the chord to be judged were varied. Priming occurred at an SOA and prime duration as short as 50 msec, the shortest tested. When the prime duration was held constant at 50 msec, priming occurred at an SOA as long as 2,500 msec, the longest tested, and the magnitude of the priming effect did not diminish. To eliminate a possible role of sensory memory in maintaining the priming effect during the silence following the prime, a 250-msec noise mask was presented immediately following the 50-msec prime. The interpolated noise mask did not eliminate priming, thereby supporting the view that chord priming is the consequence of associative activation.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Reference
Bharucha, J. J. (1987a). MUSACT: A connectionist model of musical harmony. InProceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 508–517). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bharucha, J. J. (1987b). Music cognition and perceptual facilitation: A connectionist framework.Music Perception,5, 1–30.
Bharucha, J. J. (1991). Pitch, harmony, and neural nets: A psychological perspective. In P. Todd & G. Loy (Eds.),Music and connectionism (pp. 84–99). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bharucha, J. J., &Krumhansl, C. L. (1983). The representation of harmonic structure in music: Hierarchies of stability as a function of context.Cognition,13, 63–102.
Bharucha, J. J., &Stoeckig, K. (1986). Reaction time and musical expectancy: Priming of chords.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,12, 1–8.
Bharucha, J. J., &Stoeckig, K. (1987). Priming of chords: Spreading activation or overlapping frequency spectra?Perception & Psychophysics,41, 519–524.
Fletcher, H., &Munson, W. A. (1933). Loudness, its definition, measurement and calculation.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,5, 82–108.
Kallman, H. J., &Massaro, D. W. (1979). Similarity effects in backward recognition masking.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,5, 110–128.
Kallman, H. J., &Massaro, D. W. (1983). Backward masking, the suffix effect, and perceptual storage.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,9, 312–327.
Krumhansl, C. L., Bharucha, J. J., &Castellano, M. A. (1982). Key distance effects on perceived harmonic structure in music.Perception & Psychophysics,32, 96–108.
Krumhansl, C. L., Bharucha, J. J., &Kessler, E. J. (1982). Perceived harmonic structure of chords in three related musical keys.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,8, 24–36.
Massaro, D. W. (1970a). Perceptual auditory images.Journal of Experimental Psychology,85, 411–417.
Massaro, D. W. (1970b). Retroactive interference in the short-term recognition memory for pitch.Journal of Experimental Psychology,83, 32–39.
Meyer, L. (1956).Emotion and meaning in music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Posner, M. I., Klein, R., Summers, J., &Buggie, S. (1973). On the selection of signals.Memory & Cognition,1, 2–12.
Shepard, R. N. (1964). Circularity in judgments of relative pitch.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,36, 2346–2353.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Additional information
This research was supported by Grant BNS-8910778 to the second author from the National Science Foundation.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tekman, H.G., Bharucha, J.J. Time course of chord priming. Perception & Psychophysics 51, 33–39 (1992). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205071
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205071