ABSTRACT
Speaking about the treatment of temporal information, John Michon (1979, p. 276) regretted that ten years ago such questions had so rarely been broached until the present time. “The principals on which the access and storage of temporal information are based are still, for the most part unknown,” he wrote. “There is reason to suppose that during storage events can in some way be given a time label. In this case these time labels could be used to reconstruct temporal relations; (…) The labelling of time used in this way is one of the most powerful strategies we have for remembering temporal relations.” Some elements of replies to the problems put forward by Michon emerge from the research discussed in this paper at least as far as the temporal organisation of listening to music is concerned. The two previous approaches (I.Deliège, 1989 Expts. 1 & 2), allowed us to see that cue indicators are based on a topographic organisation of the work and lead to the formation of a temporal schema which is similar whatever the level of musical training of the listener. The regions defined in this way are subsequently accessed in memory via a marker left by the auditory characteristics of the cues detected. (see ibid expt. 3). However the performance of musicians was superior in the latter task. The results of the approach presented here which tackles analogue problems such via a different procedure,
confirm the previous findings. There is a distinction between the organisation of groupings whilst listening on the one hand, and their retention on the other, which is controlled by the relevant cognitive processes in relation to the degree of training acquired.
