When a song gets stuck in your head, it can be hard to pinpoint what exactly makes it so catchy. A masterfully crafted melody or drum beat has the power to stick with a listener for decades.
Put simply, syncopation happens when rhythms are played off beat in an unexpected way. The main action of syncopated rhythms occur off the main beats in a piece of music. It might not sound that important, but without syncopation, all music would live in a world of complete rhythmic predictability.
Syncopation injects life into all genres of music by adding variety, character, and, in some cases, groove to music. Any pitched or non-pitched instrument can play syncopated rhythms. This musical example features syncopated rhythms:. Negative values indicated the amount by which the second phrase was lower than the first phrase in the quali-ty referred to by the dimension in question, and positive values indicated the amount by which the second phrase was higher in this quality.
Once a response was made, the participant clicked a right arrow icon to close the current screen and open the screen for the next example. On each screen the following instructions were displayed:. Listen to the melody, comparing the second half with the first half. The start of the second half can be identified by a change in instrumentation tone colour. Rate the second half of the piece with respect to the first half on the scale of:.
This dimension name was displayed in large font in each case. Each of the five blocks one per dimension took about 10 min to complete. Participants were encouraged to take a short break after each block. Block and trial order were randomised, and the particular exemplars of test patterns 80 in total rated with respect to each dimension were counterbalanced across participants. In other words, each participant encountered each of the 80 test items once across the five rating blocks, with the particular set of 16 items encountered in each block being counterbalanced across participants.
The main data of interest were ratings from the US and SU test conditions, wherein degree of syncopation changed between melodic phrases. The UU and SS conditions, in which syncopatedness was not varied, were included in the design as baseline conditions to control for response biases e.
This baseline subtraction also served to remove any effects that the change in timbre and perceived intensity between the first and second phrases of the stimulus patterns may have had on ratings. The motivation for using these indices is that we were interested in judgements about changes in syncopation between phrases i. Think of US as an increase in syncopation across the two halves of the stimulus item, SU as a decrease in syncopation, and UU and SS as situations where level of syncopation remains constant throughout the item low and high, respectively.
Following this logic, US-UU is informative about how much the dependent measure in question changes when syncopation increases, relative to when is stays at its initial level. SU-SS is informative about how much the relevant dependent measure changes when syncopation decreases , relative to when is stays at its initial level.
The total weight assigned to each event was the sum of its durational and melodic accent weights see Dixon, Rests were assigned zero weights. Onset times were defined according to the shortest beat-subdivision intervals i. The lag-4 autocorrelation of weighted onsets marking these subdivisions — that is, the correlation between the accent strength of events separated by two beats was taken as a measure of syncopatedness. The rationale behind this was as follows: The more similar events separated by two beats are in terms of accent strength, the more the pattern conforms to canonical quadruple metric structure see Brown, ; and, as a corollary, the more different events separated by two beats are in accent strength, the greater the violation of quadruple metric structure.
Thus, given our manipulations of metric structure described above , low lag-4 autocorrelation coefficients are taken to indicate high syncopatedness. We employed an autocorrelation-based measure with weighted onsets rather than alternative formal methods of estimating rhythmic complexity because we expected that the latter would not be maximally informative in the case of our stimulus patterns.
Existing alternative methods e. They therefore yield identical syncopation scores for all stimulus items within our unsyncopated pool and all items within our syncopated pool because patterns within pools were constructed from the same basic rhythmic motives. Moreover, alternative methods are designed to handle short cyclic monotone patterns, while we employed longer patterns with melodic variation that were suitable for autocorrelation analysis.
The lag-4 autocorrelation coefficient for each U and S pattern used in the study is shown in Table 1. Because we were interested in changes in syncopation from the first to the second phrase of each stimulus item, the lag-4 autocorrelation coefficient for the first phrase was subtracted from the lag-4 autocorrelation coefficient for the second phrase of each US, SU, UU, and SS item.
Examining the relationship between objective and subjective measures was intended to permit more fine-grained analysis of how rhythmic structure affects average listener response than what could be achieved by analyses that focus simply on the categorical distinction between syncopated and unsyncopated rhythms.
In other words, the correlation analysis aimed at detecting effects of subtle differences in syncopatedness due to melodic and duration accents. The values are expressed as percentages of the total range of possible rating values in each direction i. The fact that there was an overall positive bias in ratings is quite striking.
Error bars represent the standard error of the mean. UU, SU vs. SS on each dimension. Overall, this qualitative pattern of results suggests that ratings were influenced more strongly by increasing syncopation which affected four out of five dimensions than by decreasing syncopation which affected only two dimensions. Only happiness and enjoyment seem to be immune to this asymmetry. The next analysis was conducted to examine interrelationships between scores on the five dimensions across stimuli.
The resultant correlation matrix is shown in Table 3. One of the research questions posed in the Introduction concerned which dimensions are related to enjoyment. As can be seen in Table 3 , a significant positive correlation was observed between rated happiness expressed by the musical pattern and enjoyment, indicating that items that attracted high ratings on one dimension also attracted high ratings on the other dimension.
None of the other dimensions were correlated reliably with enjoyment. Another research question concerns whether arousal and tension ratings are related. We found no evidence for such a relationship, suggesting that these dimensions were treated independently. First, it can be briefly noted that, as can be seen in Table 1 , this objective measure confirmed that conformity to quadruple metric structure a decreased from Phrase 1 to Phrase 2 in all US items, b increased from Phrase 1 to Phrase 2 in all SU items, and c was constant across phrases in all UU items and SS items, on average, while being overall higher for UU than for SS items.
The correlation between objective indices and subjective indices for each dimension was calculated across items to address this issue. As can be seen in Table 3 , objective indices were significantly correlated with happiness, enjoyment, and tension, with the negative correlation coefficients indicating that more metric violation i. Objective indices were not correlated reliably with subjective indices for complexity and arousal.
Neither of these analyses yielded statistically significant results. The aim of this study was to examine the cognitive and affective responses to musical rhythms that varied in degree of syncopation. We were particularly interested in the cognitive and affective implications of creating music in which rhythmic structure moves from simple to complex or vice versa.
Our underlying motivation was related to psychological processes that may drive preferences by composers, improvisers, and listeners for simple themes followed by more complex variations, rather than the reverse, in musical forms such as theme and variations. We discuss the results according to the four specific research questions of the study.
The results of the experiment indicate that perceived complexity increases when a melody moves from unsyncopated to syncopated. However, the reverse is not true: Unsyncopated melodies were rated as statistically equivalent in complexity to syncopated melodies when they followed the syncopated melodies.
This asymmetry is discussed in Point 4, below, and provides an explanation of why a reliable overall correlation between syncopation and complexity was not observed. The results concerning effects of syncopation on affective dimensions were relatively clear. Here it was found that syncopated patterns were rated as happier than unsyncopated patterns, irrespective of the serial ordering of the two types of pattern.
Somewhat surprisingly, however, ratings of arousal and tension which were uncorrelated indicated weak and generally unreliable effects of syncopation on these dimensions though the direction of the effects was consistent with the hypothesis that syncopation increases arousal and tension.
The higher the levels of syncopation are and the greater degrees of metric ambiguity that characterize musical genres such as jazz , the more pronounced impact upon perceived arousal and tension. Taken together, the current findings suggest that our manipulation of syncopatedness affected valence more than the arousal dimension of emotion. We held tempo constant, and we controlled for the effects of varying timbre and intensity across the two phrases of our stimuli.
However, our results suggest that in the absence of such covariation, syncopation is a device that may primarily be geared towards enhancing positive affect. Our results indicate that syncopated rhythms are enjoyed more than unsyncopated patterns. This effect appears to be symmetric and independent of serial order. That is, whether the syncopated rhythm was presented as the first or second pattern within a pair, it was judged to be higher in terms of enjoyment than the unsyncopated pattern which was rated lower when it was heard as the second pattern of a pair.
Importantly, as was the case with arousal and tension above, we urge caution in drawing a simple conclusion about the effect of syncopation on enjoyment. Our results may be specific to the moderate degrees of rhythmic complexity that characterize the stimuli that we employed. Increasing complexity further consider, e. Further research in which rhythmic complexity is extended to levels that may reduce preference responses could lead to a more complete understanding of the relationship between cognitive processing and aesthetic response.
While the enjoyment of syncopation is a major finding of our study, we also sought to investigate whether enjoyment is related to other subjective variables. This question was motivated by the fact that previous studies have highlighted the importance of emotion as a contributor to musical preference see Schubert, a. Our design allowed this issue to be investigated in the context of musical rhythm.
We found that, overall, perceived complexity, arousal, and tension ratings did not correlate significantly with enjoyment across items within our pool of stimulus items, but happiness ratings did.
Syncopated rhythms were enjoyed more and considered happier than unsyncopated rhythms, regardless of whether the syncopated pattern appeared first or second in the stimulus pair. Although the finding that happy sounding rhythms are enjoyable is unsurprising, the fact that happiness was the only factor that was related to enjoyment is noteworthy insofar as it supports our earlier proposal that syncopation functions primarily to enhance positive affect.
We predicted an asymmetric effect of changes in syncopatedness on perceived complexity on the basis of auditory psychophysical work and the apparent predominance of increasing complexity in musical forms such as theme and variations.
It was an open question whether asymmetries in enjoyment, happiness, arousal, and tension would be observed. Our results indicate that valence-based assessments enjoyment and happiness are symmetrical in serial order: Movement from a simple to a complex rhythm produced high positive ratings to the same degree that movement from a complex to a simple rhythm produced relatively low negative ratings.
The perception of tension was similarly symmetric, though increases and decreases on this dimension were not statistically significant. The cognitive variable of perceived complexity, however, showed strong serial order asymmetry, as expected.
Melodies that moved from simple unsyncopated to complex syncopated were reported to increase in complexity, while no statistical change in complexity was reported in the case of complex to simple progressions. Such an asymmetry was also observed in arousal judgements, though the effect was weak.
The superficial similarity of arousal and complexity ratings may suggest that perceived complexity but not necessarily objective complexity is linked more strongly to emotional arousal than to valence. High arousal emotions of happiness and anger, on the other hand, were positively correlated with com-plexity in their study.
This dissociation can be taken to suggest that preferences for serial progressions that move from simple to complex materials in music at least in the case of rhythm may stem more from cognitive considerations related to perceived complexity than from affective considerations, such as perceived valence. We speculate that composers and improvisers may intuitively favor musical forms characterized by progression from structurally simple to complex rhythmic materials for two reasons.
Second, the serial ordering of complexity relations may influence the salience of structural changes, and thus shape their aesthetic implications. On this note, our finding that changes from unsyncopated to syncopated patterns influenced perceived complexity, while the reverse was not the case, suggests that increasing syncopa-tedness is more salient than decreasing syncopatedness.
In other words, increases in rhythmic complexity move the listener to a greater degree than decreases in complexity. Our results suggest that such decreases have negligible effects on perceived complexity, and they in fact reduce enjoyment.
Thus, our results suggest that the concept of the ramp archetype Huron, , may apply to rhythmic complexity, and specifically the treatment of syncopation.
The findings of the current study suggest that the serial ordering of rhythm patterns that vary in complexity unsyncopated to syncopated vs. Whereas the enjoyment and perceived happiness of musical rhythms are modulated symmetrically with increases and decreases in syncopation between short musical phrases, perceived complexity is heightened with increasing syncopation but remains constant in the face of decreasing syncopation.
This asymmetry in perceived complexity which also characterizes perceived arousal to some degree has implications for the cognitive processing and aesthetic appreciation of musical rhythmic structure.
Successful composers and improvisers may be sensitive to these implications, and consequently favor musical forms in which progression from simple to complex material is more prevalent than the reverse. A final remark on the generalizabilty of our findings and, more broadly, the universality of musical cognitive and emotional processing is in order. The fact that our study employed a set of rhythmic stimulus materials that were restricted to a single meter quadruple , tempo beats per minute , and mode F major , raises the question whether similar results would be observed with different materials.
It would, in future work, be particularly interesting to compare the perception of changes in rhythmic complexity in Western musical traditions and in cultures where rhythm is organized by principles other than metric hierarchies built on simple integer ratios e. The authors wish to thank Bruno Repp and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Although his selection criteria were not described in detail, a smoothness scale that links these categories in an ordered progression can be deduced.
For a discussion of this issue, see Damasio National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Adv Cogn Psychol v. Adv Cogn Psychol. Published online Dec Peter E. Keller 1 and Emery Schubert 2. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. E-mail: ua. Received Apr 18; Accepted Nov This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract This study investigated cognitive and emotional effects of syncopation, a feature of musical rhythm that produces expectancy violations in the listener by emphasising weak temporal locations and de-emphasising strong locations in metric structure.
Keywords: syncopation, serial asymmetry, affective response, cognition, rhythm, emotion, musical form. Rhythm and emotion Music is able to produce emotional expressions that listeners within a given culture can agree upon e. Syncopation in rhythmic structure In contrast to the relationship between rhythm and emotion, the relationship between rhythmic structure and cognitive complexity is quite well understood. Open in a separate window. Figure 1. Example of unsyncopated and syncopated rhythm in quadruple meter.
Asymmetries in perception As noted earlier, one of the driving forces behind the current investigation is to examine potential reasons for why musical forms such as theme and variations tend to move from simple to complex, at least initially.
Overview of the current study The aim of the current study is to examine cognitive and affective responses to changes in rhythmic syncopatedness, and to gauge the cognitive and affective implications of moving from unsyncopated to syncopated for the listener. This paradigm was designed to address the following specific research questions: 1. Do listeners enjoy syncopated rhythms more than unsyncopated ones? Method Participants Thirty-five upper level undergraduate music students, 19 female and six male, took part in the study in return for course credit.
Stimuli Melodies consisting of two 4-bar phrases in quadruple meter were used as stimuli. Figure 2. Five melodic pitch series a-e from which stimuli were derived. Figure 3. Suspension 2. An off-beat syncopated rhythm occurs when shorter notes land on the strong beat and followed by a longer note on the off-beat. The second half of beat one is the quarter note. The quarter note takes up half of the beat on and half of beat two.
The quarter note is the beat. Do melodies have rhythm? Yes, they do! In music theory reading syncopated rhythms can be found in melodies. This melody is made up of quite a few syncopated rhythms. Melodic Syncopation. Below is a special bonus item for this article.
Ragtime music is a great example of syncopated rhythms. This video is one more quick example of Great Syncopation! I absolutely dare you to click on this video.
You must be logged in to post a comment. Music Theory: Reading Syncopated Rhythms By reading this article you have catapulted yourself into the next level of learning how to read more advanced rhythms. Types of Syncopation In music theory, reading syncopated rhythms will be much easier if we understand what type they are.
The Missing Sound on a Weak Beat We will learn this one first as it is the easiest form of syncopation. Suspension This type of syncopated rhythm occurs when certain notes are carried over the barline. Suspension 1 Suspension 2 Off-beat An off-beat syncopated rhythm occurs when shorter notes land on the strong beat and followed by a longer note on the off-beat.
Melodic Syncopation Bonus!
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