Timing of ornaments in the theme from Beethoven’s Paisiello Variations: Empirical Data and a Model Renee Timmers, Richard Ashley, Peter Desain, Henkjan Honing, and W. Luke Windsor ‘Music, Mind, Machine’ group, Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands School of Music, Northwestern University, United States Department of Music, University of Leeds [Timmers, R., Ashley, R., Desain, P., Honing, H., & Windsor, L. W. (2002). Timing of ornaments in the theme of Beethoven’s Paisiello Variations: Empirical Data and a Model. Music Perception.] Correspondence to: Renee Timmers, NICI P.O. 9104 NL-6500 HE Nijmegen, E-mail:
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[email protected]. 1 Abstract Musicians have to make many interpretive decisions when performing a piece. For example, the grace note, a one-note musical ornament, has no precise duration written in the score; it has to steal its duration from either the preceding or following melody notes. The empirical questions this study seeks to answer are: what duration grace notes are given; whether this varies depending upon musical context or individual differences; and whether their durations are subtracted from the preceding or subsequent melody note, or by inserting additional duration and leaving these preceding and subsequent durations unchanged. In an experiment, sixteen professional pianists performed three musical fragments (from a Beethoven Theme) ‘with’ and ‘without’ grace notes in seven different.