Resonance and the Perception of Musical Meter

Many connectionist approaches to musical expectancy and music composition let the question of What next? overshadow the equally important question of When next?. One cannot escape the latter question, one of temporal structure, when considering the perception of musical meter. We view the perception of metrical structure as a dynamic process where the temporal organization of external musical events synchronizes, or entrains, a listeners internal processing mechanisms. This article introduces a novel connectionist unit, based upon a mathematical model of entrainment, capable of phase- and frequency-locking to periodic components of incoming rhythmic patterns. Networks of these units can self-organize temporally structured responses to rhythmic patterns. The resulting network behavior embodies the perception of metrical structure. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of our approach for theories of metrical structure and musical expectancy.