Music perception generally involves processing the frequency relationships between successive pitches and extraction of the melodic contour. Previous evidence has suggested that the 'ups' and 'downs' of melodic contour are categorically and automatically processed, but knowledge of the brain regions that discriminate different types of contour is limited. Here, we examined melodic contour discr...

We explored the extent to which working memory underpins the processing of relational information in melodies. Using a between subjects design, one group of participants was primed with a melodic stream while performing a concurrent 2-back task while the other group was also primed with the melodic stream but did not perform a concurrent task. Participants were then given a melodic relational c...

The goal of this study was to investigate several factors that determine musical stability in unaccompanied tonal melodies. Following M. R. Jones's (1987) theory of dynamic attending, the author assumed that strongly accented tones act as stable melodic reference points. Three main results were observed: (a) tonal structure, rhythm, and melodic factors (i.e., pitch skips or change in melodic co...

Pitch discrimination tasks typically engage the superior temporal gyrus and the right inferior frontal gyrus. It is currently unclear whether these regions are equally involved in the processing of incongruous notes in melodies, which requires the representation of musical structure (tonality) in addition to pitch discrimination. To this aim, 14 participants completed two tasks while undergoing...

The present paper explores a novel way of characterising the contour of melodic phrases. Melodic contour is represented by a curve that can be derived from fitting a polynomial equation to the pitch values given the note onsets. To represent contour numerically, we consider the coefficients of the polynomial equation as well as the time limits of the melodic phrase. After a brief review of diff...

We propose a mid-level melody-based representation that incorporates melodic, rhythmic and structural aspects of a music signal and is useful for calculating audio similarity measures. Most current approaches to music similarity use either low-level signal features, such as MFCCs that mostly capture timbral characteristics of music and contain little semantic information, or require symbolic re...

In this paper we propose a computational model for stochastic melodic synthesis based on an emergent approach developed through multiagent systems. In general automatic musical composition approaches, the states transition probabilities are obtained from statistical analysis of musical segments provided by the user, which tends to generate musical results very similar to the initial musical seg...

We introduce a new model for melodic segmentation based on information-dynamic analysis of melodic structure. The performance of the model is compared to several existing algorithms in predicting the annotated phrase boundaries in a large corpus of folk music.