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# Western listeners detect boundary hierarchy in Indian music: a segmentation study

## Details

**Authors** Popescu, Tudor and Widdess, Richard and Rohrmeier, Martin

**Year** 2021

**Publisher** Scientific Reports

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Music Theory

**Secondary disciplines** Cognitive Science, Psychology

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82629-y) 
10.1038/s41598-021-82629-y

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To test whether listeners unfamiliar with Indian classical music can segment it into phrases and perceive a hierarchy of boundaries.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

65 Western listeners with mixed musical training, plus expert segmentations, of sitar alap recordings in two raga modes.

### How they did it (methods)

Participants marked phrase boundaries while listening to alap recordings in two ragas; their boundary placements were compared with each other and with expert segmentations, including by boundary level and by real-time click timing.

### What they found (results)

Participants agreed substantially with one another and with experts on where boundaries fall, although click timing varied by boundary level and recording. Musical training did not affect segmentation. Listeners showed real-time sensitivity to hierarchical grouping and to completion of phrases.

## Commentary

### In short

Listeners with no background in Indian music marked phrase boundaries in sitar recordings in close agreement with each other and with experts, and their markings reflected nested levels of grouping.

### Response

The finding bears on Distinctions and Systems: phrase boundaries are drawn between what belongs inside a unit and what lies outside it, and the units nest, with larger groupings containing smaller ones. That untrained listeners recover this structure across a musical culture they do not know supports the claim that boundary-drawing and part-whole nesting are not learned conventions of a single tradition. Caveats: assessed from the abstract and a summary only; the authors themselves offer several explanations, including bottom-up acoustic cues and implicit learning, so the result does not isolate a cognitive universal; the study shows existence of the structure in perception, not an effect of using it.

**Patterns it shows** D, S

Shows the structure is there

**Added** 2026-10-21

**How to cite this** Popescu, Tudor and Widdess, Richard and Rohrmeier, Martin (2021). Western listeners detect boundary hierarchy in Indian music: a segmentation study. Scientific Reports.