Rhythm and Pitch in Music

Rhythm and pitch are the 2 primary dimensions of music. They are interesting psychologically because simple, well-defined units combine to form highly complex and varied patterns. This article brings together the major developments in research on how these dimensions are perceived and remembered, beginning with psychophysical results on time and pitch perception. Progressively larger units are considered, moving from basic psychological categories of temporal and frequency ratios, to pulse and scale, to metrical and tonal hierarchies, tothe formation of musical rhythms and melodies, and finally to the cognitive representation f large-scale musical form. Interactions between the dimensions are considered, and major theoretical proposals are described. The article identifies various links between musical structure and perceptual nd cognitive processes, uggesting psychological influences on how sounds are patterned inmusic. Music perception has a long and distinguished history as a topic of psychological investigation. It has been considered within vir-tually every major theoretical framework of psychology and stud-ied with diverse methodologies. Insights about music perception have come from approaches as wideranging as psychophysics,