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Structure

To speak of the structure of music is to speak of how sounds are organized to be recognized by humans as music, rather than some other kind of sound. This organization of musical sounds—musical structure—is the basis on which all musical experience depends. Understanding the psychological and behavioral dimensions of music depends on understanding the structure of the music involved in a given situation, no less than understanding language behaviors depends on the structure of the language involved. Approaches to musical structure most typically consider it a multidimensional or multiparametric phenomenon, with the parameters most often temporal (rhythmic), categorical with regard to relatively slow-changing frequencies (pitch), categorical with regard to relatively quickly changing frequencies (timbre), and larger-scale organization of all of these (form).

Rhythm

All music involves sounds in time and the deploying of these in some way, regardless of how musical pitch may or may not be employed; rhythm may be considered the organization of sounds in time. Without such organization, time perception is often vague and uncertain; an important role of rhythm in music is to facilitate categorical processing of temporal structures so that comparisons and contrasts can be made between durations and groups of durations. Rhythmic structure in music may involve the organization of time spans, of sequences of beats, or both. Time spans, or musical groups, are sequentially organized, in which musical groups follow one another, and hierarchically, in which smaller groups, such as motives, gestures, or phrases, are subsumed by larger groups, such as sections or entire pieces.

In some views, groups may have relative strengths, such as the strong and weak beats of poetic feet; other scholars see these issues as separate, with the accent structures corresponding to strong beats, and weak beats having salience only at lower levels of musical structure, with grouping more important over longer time spans. For much of the world's music, rhythmic structure also involves a recurring, more or less regular beat or tactus, which can also be hierarchically organized into recurring groups of beats, usually in multiples of two or three. These hierarchic groupings are the basis of meter, the aspect of rhythm involving recurring stresses or accents. Empirical investigations into musical rhythm thus can delve into issues related to grouping, such as segmentation or meter, and also entrainment, in which a listener's actions become synchronized with an external rhythmic source, such as a piece of music.

Pitch

In Western culture, pitch takes pride of place in investigations into musical structure and the perception of musical structure. This may be because of the relatively fine granularity of pitch perception (perhaps 1,000 categorically different ones over the frequency range of human audition), compared to, for example, durations. Individual pitches are understood to be related to other pitches both in local contexts, such as those provided by successions of small groups of notes, and in how these combine into larger units, such as phrases, groups of phrases, and entire compositions. Beyond this, pitches can be understood as relating to global contexts, such as musical keys. Although there are theories of pitch organization from complex chromatic tonal music and for post-tonal music, which lacks a key center, fewer empirical investigations have been carried out, although there have been studies of the perception of 12-tone or “serial” structure and perception of similarity relationships in “free” atonal music. Empirical studies have generally found stronger support for the psychological reality of the hierarchic pitch relationships of tonal music than the associative or serial relationships of atonal music.

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