Colloquium: How do pitch and time combine in music perception?

A central aim of cognitive psychology is to explain how we integrate stimulus information into a unified percept, but how the dimensions of pitch and time combine in the perception of music remains a largely unresolved issue. Despite claims that these dimensions are either independent or interactive, the variety of findings suggests that they are neither. Instead, pitch-time relations may vary on the basis of dimensional salience – defined as the tendency for one perceptual dimension to dominate another, even when both are equally difficult to process (i.e., equated discriminability). Using quantitative behavioural responses to musical and non-musical sequences, I explore this concept and existing theories of pitch-time integration, providing evidence that the presence of organisational structure in one dimension increases its salience. In the context of music, a number of stimulus, task, and cultural factors likely influence dimensional salience, and the concept may apply more generally to perceptual processing in multiple domains.