Temporal Structure Perception in Tonal and Atonal Music: An Online Behavioural Study

How does tonal structure shape the perception of temporal information in music? We addressed this question across five online behavioural experiments (N = 487). Using a dedicated scrambling algorithm (`quilting'), segments of tonal (Bach) and atonal (Krenek) violin recordings were rearranged while preserving variable temporal structures (60--3840 ms), and participants rated perceived naturalness. Naturalness increased with the intact segment length for both corpora following a piecewise linear function, with comparable slopes and elbow points---but a consistently higher plateau for tonal music. Tonal and temporal structures thus seem to contribute independently and additively to naturalness perception. A cross-domain comparison with speech quilts revealed a reversed familiarity effect, suggesting domain-specificity for processing in temporal processing. In addition, musicians showed heightened sensitivity specifically in atonal music. In non-musicians, self-reported Perceptual Abilities (Gold-MSI) were robustly associated with the tonal music elbow point and the tonal--atonal plateau difference, replicated via cross-validation. These findings demonstrate parallel processing of tonal and temporal structure in music, with musicality shaping temporal integration even without formal training.