Musical Structure Influences the Perception of Sound Location
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The perception of multilayered auditory stimuli, such as music or speech, relies on the integration of progressively more complex and abstract features as they are processed along the auditory pathway. To investigate whether higher-level musical structure modulates auditory perception or merely the interpretation of perceived information, we examined the interaction between sound location-a low-level feature-and musical phrases, which are structures spanning across seconds and require temporal integration of information within continuous stimuli. This was to observe whether musical phrase boundaries modulate pre-attentive and explicit sensitivity to the location changes. Participants listened to melodies with randomized location changes and either actively reported detection of change or passively listened while EEG data were collected. Analysis of mismatch negativity responses revealed significantly larger amplitudes for location changes occurring at phrase boundaries, suggesting that musical grouping enhances the perceptual salience of these changes, conveyed by physically identical cues. Behaviorally, participants showed no difference in sensitivity but were more likely to report location changes at phrase boundaries, even when no change occurred. These findings demonstrate that higher-level musical structure modulates pre-attentive auditory processing and influences perception of spatial location. This effect appears to rely on fundamental auditory mechanisms rather than musical expertise, highlighting the dynamic interaction between abstract musical structure and low-level sensory processing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".