The importance of harmony perception in understanding tonal melodies has been extensively studied, but underlying processes of implied harmonic perception remain unexplored. This study explores how listeners perceive implied harmony in real-time while hearing tonal melodies by addressing two questions: How is each tone of a tonal melody harmonically interpreted and integrated into the previous tones? How do harmonic expectations of “what” chord will follow and “when” the chord change will occur affect the processing? Participants with music training listened to tonal melodies and responded to target tones by singing their pitches as quickly as possible. The target tones implied an expected or an unexpected chord; they occurred at expected or unexpected times. The results showed that sing-back reaction times (RTs) were shorter for: 1) tones implying an expected chord; and 2) chord changes occurring at expected times, suggesting that harmonic expectations facilitate the processing of tonal melodies. Also, RTs became shorter over the presentation of successive target tones implying the same chord, suggesting that implied harmony becomes clearer as more tones belonging to a single chord are presented.

中文翻译：

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音调旋律感知中隐含和声的在线处理

和谐感知在理解音调旋律中的重要性已被广泛研究，但是隐含的谐波感知的潜在过程仍未探索。这项研究通过解决两个问题，探索了听众在听音调旋律时如何实时感知隐含的和声：一个音调旋律的每个音调如何谐调地解释并整合到先前的音调中？如何遵循“什么”和弦的和声期望，以及“何时”发生和弦变化会影响处理？参加过音乐训练的参与者会听音调，并通过尽快唱出音调来回应目标音调。目标音调暗示了预期的和意外的和弦；它们发生在预期或意外的时间。结果表明，单反应时间（RTs）较短：1）暗示预期和弦的音调；2）和弦变化发生在预期的时间，这表明和声预期有助于音调旋律的处理。而且，在表示相同和弦的连续目标音调的呈现过程中，RT变得更短，这表明随着出现更多属于单个和弦的音调，隐含的和声变得更加清晰。