Timing plays an important role in the performance and appreciation of almost all types of music. It has been studied extensively in music perception and music performance research (see Palmer 1997 for a review). The most important outcome of this research is that a large part of the timing patterns found in music performance—commonly referred to as expressive timing—can be explained in terms of...

Tempo estimation aims at estimating the pace of a musical piece measured in beats per minute. This paper presents a new tempo estimation method that utilizes coherent energy changes across multiple frequency sub-bands to identify the onsets. A new measure, called the sub-band synchrony, is proposed to detect and quantify the coherent amplitude changes across multiple sub-bands. Given a musical ...

The present study reexamined the mood-mediation hypothesis for explaining background-music-dependent effects in free recall. Experiments 1 and 2 respectively examined tempo- and tonality-dependent effects in free recall, which had been used as evidence for the mood-mediation hypothesis. In Experiments 1 and 2, undergraduates (n = 75 per experiment) incidentally learned a list of 20 unrelated wo...

The question as to whether or not tempo effects distort the measurement of period mortality is controversial in recent demographic research. Only few publications, however, illustrate the underlying phenomenon of tempo effects, namely that the period death rate may increase although the mortality of all cohorts living during the analyzed period has fallen. Moreover, related literature only focu...

Studies of speech tempo commonly use syllable or segment rate as a proxy measure for perceived tempo. In languages whose phonologies allow substantial syllable complexity these measures can produce figures on quite different scales; however, little is known about the correlation between syllable and segment rate measurements on the one hand and naïve listeners’ tempo judgements on the other. We...

Spontaneous motor tempo and rhythmical synchronisation were studied in 21⁄2to 4-year-old children. Children were tested in three sessions, each of which included three consecutive tasks: first, spontaneous manual tapping tempo, second, synchronisation to external tempo, followed by spontaneous manual tapping tempo again. Results showed that regular spontaneous manual tapping tempo could be obse...

Photooxidation of alcohols to the corresponding aldehydes with a porphyrin/quinone/TEMPO (TEMPO=2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-1-piperidinyloxy free radical) system is described. This photoreaction is a combination of a photoinduced electron transfer from the porphyrin to the quinone and a TEMPO-catalyzed oxidation of alcohols triggered by one electron oxidation. The rates of oxidation were in the order o...

We investigated effects of legato, staccato and pizzicato articulation styles on the perception of modulated tempos. Seventy-two music majors served as participants. Two solo violin excerpts were chosen with contrasting rhythmic rates and were recorded in all three articulation styles. Examples were presented to listeners in three conditions of tempo modulation: gradual increase, gradual decrea...

We will demonstrate our content-based music information retrieval system with automatic DJ mixing, which proposes a new, entertaining way to listen to MIR results. Typical MIR systems present MIR results to the user in a list format, from which users select and play songs. In order to improve this dull user experience, our system not only conducts content-based MIR, but also automatically mixes...