Attending in complex musical interactions: The adaptive dual role of meter

Complex musical interactions - such as performing in, and listening to, musical ensembles - require flexible attentional strategies. Here it is proposed that metric frameworks generated by the listener or performer function adaptively to facilitate this requisite flexibility by fulfilling a dual role. On one hand, metric frameworks serve as hierarchical templates for specifying the temporal organisation of events represented in memory, and on the other, they act as dynamic attentional schemes that guide real-time processing. Existing models of musical rhythmic behaviour typically focus on meter's role in either representation or processing. However, both perspectives need to be considered in order to understand behaviour in complex multipart musical contexts.